rself. But he was making
an even greater renunciation.

Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for
lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected
her one little phrase about Wayne's hands to change her daughter's love
into repugnance,--that sentence had been only the first drop in a
distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,--but she had
supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further
criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually
indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one
was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had
much patience.

Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family
slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention;
it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide
answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she
answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a
more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud
until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like
a flash of lightning.

Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in
the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion
with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself
as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the
menace was beyond her. She couldn't think of anything to say.

Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and
she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a
state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask
recklessly, "Have you been to the theater lately?" and she would question
gently, "The theater?" as much as to say, "I've heard that word
somewhere before," until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing
from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning
banality and sink out of sight forever.

But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He
had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and
thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk
to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not
listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grand