第9章

It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day, inclosing a card of invitation from Mrs.Bray and expressing the hope that Rose would come and dine and let her ladyship take her.She should have only one of her own girls; Gwendolen Vesey was to take the other.

Rose handed both the note and the card in silence to her mother; the latter exhibited only the name of Miss Tramore."You had much better go, dear," her mother said; in answer to which Miss Tramore slowly tore up the documents, looking with clear, meditative eyes out of the window.Her mother always said "You had better go"--there had been other incidents--and Rose had never even once taken account of the observation.She would make no first advances, only plenty of second ones, and, condoning no discrimination, would treat no omission as venial.She would keep all concessions till afterwards; then she would make them one by one.Fighting society was quite as hard as her grandmother had said it would be; but there was a tension in it which made the dreariness vibrate--the dreariness of such a winter as she had just passed.Her companion had cried at the end of it, and she had cried all through; only her tears had been private, while her mother's had fallen once for all, at luncheon on the bleak Easter Monday--produced by the way a silent survey of the deadly square brought home to her that every creature but themselves was out of town and having tremendous fun.Rose felt that it was useless to attempt to explain simply by her mourning this severity of solitude;for if people didn't go to parties (at least a few didn't) for six months after their father died, this was the very time other people took for coming to see them.It was not too much to say that during this first winter of Rose's period with her mother she had no communication whatever with the world.It had the effect of making her take to reading the new American books: she wanted to see how girls got on by themselves.She had never read so much before, and there was a legitimate indifference in it when topics failed with her mother.They often failed after the first days, and then, while she bent over instructive volumes, this lady, dressed as if for an impending function, sat on the sofa and watched her.Rose was not embarrassed by such an appearance, for she could reflect that, a little before, her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge in queer researches to look at.She was moreover used to her mother's attitude by this time.She had her own description of it:

it was the attitude of waiting for the carriage.If they didn't go out it was not that Mrs.Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had even an alarmed prevision of their some day always arriving first.

Mrs.Tramore's conversation at such moments was abrupt, inconsequent and personal.She sat on the edge of sofas and chairs and glanced occasionally at the fit of her gloves (she was perpetually gloved, and the fit was a thing it was melancholy to see wasted), as people do who are expecting guests to dinner.Rose used almost to fancy herself at times a perfunctory husband on the other side of the fire.

What she was not yet used to--there was still a charm in it--was her mother's extraordinary tact.During the years they lived together they never had a discussion; a circumstance all the more remarkable since if the girl had a reason for sparing her companion (that of being sorry for her) Mrs.Tramore had none for sparing her child.

She only showed in doing so a happy instinct--the happiest thing about her.She took in perfection a course which represented everything and covered everything; she utterly abjured all authority.

She testified to her abjuration in hourly ingenious, touching ways.

In this manner nothing had to be talked over, which was a mercy all round.The tears on Easter Monday were merely a nervous gust, to help show she was not a Christmas doll from the Burlington Arcade;and there was no lifting up of the repentant Magdalen, no uttered remorse for the former abandonment of children.Of the way she could treat her children her demeanour to this one was an example; it was an uninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction.She took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you had noticed these ladies without knowing their history you would have wondered what tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectful to youth.No mother was ever so filial as Mrs.Tramore, and there had never been such a difference of position between sisters.Not that the elder one fawned, which would have been fearful; she only renounced--whatever she had to renounce.If the amount was not much she at any rate made no scene over it.Her hand was so light that Rose said of her secretly, in vague glances at the past, "No wonder people liked her!" She never characterised the old element of interference with her mother's respectability more definitely than as "people." They were people, it was true, for whom gentleness must have been everything and who didn't demand a variety of interests.The desire to "go out" was the one passion that even a closer acquaintance with her parent revealed to Rose Tramore.She marvelled at its strength, in the light of the poor lady's history: there was comedy enough in this unquenchable flame on the part of a woman who had known such misery.She had drunk deep of every dishonour, but the bitter cup had left her with a taste for lighted candles, for squeezing up staircases and hooking herself to the human elbow.Rose had a vision of the future years in which this taste would grow with restored exercise--of her mother, in a long-tailed dress, jogging on and on and on, jogging further and further from her sins, through a century of the "Morning Post" and down the fashionable avenue of time.She herself would then be very old--she herself would be dead.Mrs.