FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121  
122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   >>   >|  
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
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121  
122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Adelaide
 

Mathilde

 

futility

 

theater

 

finally

 
answered
 
inexperienced
 

phrase

 
expected
 

luncheon


thought

 

ignore

 
afraid
 

pictures

 
conversation
 

couldn

 
silences
 
menace
 

indifference

 

coercion


listening

 

caught

 

symptoms

 

viewed

 

relations

 

utmost

 

unafraid

 

temptation

 

question

 

gently


engulfed

 
yawning
 

banality

 

rushing

 

forever

 
conscientious
 

resisted

 
conversationalist
 

considered

 
pitifully

social
 

methods

 
accustomed
 
courage
 

points

 

recklessly

 
conversational
 

unrest

 
gradually
 

supposed