Frances Waldeaux | Page 5

you know if I had written it I should have used just

the phrases you did? And you signed it `Sidney'!" She watched him
breathlessly. "That was more than a coincidence, don't you think? I AM
dumb, but you speak for me now. It is because we are just one. Don't
you think so, George?" She held his arm tightly.
Young Waldeaux burst into a loud laugh. Then he took her hand in his,
stroking it. "You dear little woman! What do you know of sociology?"
he said, and then walked away to hide his amusement, muttering
"Poems? Great Heavens!"
Frances looked after him steadily. "Oh, well!" she said to herself
presently.
She forced her mind back to the Quarterly article. It was a beginning of
just the kind of triumph that she always had expected for him. He
would soon be recognized by scientific men all over the world as their
confrere, especially after his year's study at Oxford.
When George was in his cradle she had planned that he should be a
clergyman, just as she had planned that he should be a well-bred man,
and she had fitted him for both roles in life, and urged him into them by
the same unceasing soft pats and pushes. She would be delighted when
she saw him in white robes serving at the altar.
Not that Frances had ever taken her religion quite seriously. It was like
her gowns, or her education, a matter of course; a trustworthy,
agreeable part of her. She had never once in her life shuddered at a
glimpse of any vice in herself, or cried to God in agony, even to grant
her a wish.
But she knew that Robert Waldeaux's son would be safer in the pulpit.
He could take rank with scholars there, too.
She inspected him now anxiously, trying to see him with the eyes of
these Oxford magnates. Nobody would guess that he was only
twenty-two. The bald spot on his crown and the spectacles gave him a
scholastic air, and the finely cut features and a cold aloofness in his
manner spoke plainly, she thought, of his good descent and high

pursuits.
Frances herself had a drop of vagabond blood which found comrades
for her among every class and color. But there was not an atom of the
tramp in her son's well-built and fashionably clothed body. He never
had had a single intimate friend even when he was a boy. He will
probably find his companions among the great English scholars," she
thought complacently. Of course she would always be his only
comrade, his chum. She continually met and parted with thousands of
people--they came and went. "But George and I will be together for all
time," she told herself.
He came up presently and sat down beside her, with an anxious,
apologetic air. It hurt him to think that he had laughed at her. "That
dark haze is the Jersey shore," he said. "How dim it grows! Well, we
are really out now in the big world! It is so good to be alone there with
you," he added, touching her arm affectionately. "Those cynical
old-men-boys at Harvard bored me."
"I don't bore you, then, George?"
"You!" He was very anxious to make her forget his roughness. "Apart
from my affection for you, mother," he said judicially, "I LIKE you. I
approve of you as I never probably shall approve of another woman.
Your peculiarities--the way your brown hair ripples back into that knot
"--surveying her critically. "And the way you always look as if you had
just come out of a bath, even on a grimy train; and your gowns, so
simple--and rich. I confess," he said gravely, "I can't always follow
your unsteady little ideas when you talk. They frisk about so. It is the
difference probably between the man's mind and the woman's. Besides,
we have been separated for so many years! But I soon will understand
you. I know that while you keep yourself apart from all the world you
open your heart to me."
"Wrap the rug about my feet, George," she said hastily, and then sent
him away upon an errand, looking after him uneasily.
It was very pleasant to hear her boy thus formally sum up his opinion

of her. But when he found that it was based upon a lie?
For Frances, candid enough to the world, had deceived her son ever
since he was born.
George had always believed that she had inherited a fortune from his
father. It gave solidity and comfort to his life to think of her in the
stately old mansion on the shores of Delaware Bay, with nothing to do
except to be beautiful and gracious, as befitted a well-born woman. It
pleased him, in a