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Updated: June 7, 2025
Lanley drew his shoulder back into the room and shut the window; as he did so he saw a trace of something impish in the smile of his hostess. "Why do you smile?" he asked quickly. She did not make the mistake of trying to arrest her smile; she let it broaden. "I don't suppose you have ever done such a thing before." "Now, that does annoy me." "Calling down five stories?"
Everybody separately cried out to her to stay as she began to retreat to the door, and no one more firmly than Adelaide, who thought it as careless as Mr. Lanley thought it creditable that a mother would be willing to go away and leave the discussion of her son's life to others. Adelaide saw an opportunity of killing two birds. "You are just the person for whom I have been longing, Mrs.
He could not bear to have people running in and out of Farron's room. "Gone?" said Lanley, as if it were somebody's fault. "Mrs. Farron came down for him in the motor. He appeared to stand his first day very well." Mr. Lanley glanced quickly from one to the other.
They talked about people and events of which Mrs. Wayne knew nothing, but her interest and good temper made her not an outsider, but an audience. Anecdotes which even Mr. Lanley might have felt were trivial gossip became, through her attention to them, incidents of the highest human interest. Such an uncritical interest was perhaps too stimulating.
Lanley, rather sharply: "I'm sure there is nothing that you'd hate more, Adelaide." She opened her dark eyes. "But I don't have to choose between squalor here or " "Squalor!" said Mr. Lanley. "Don't be ridiculous!" Mathilde broke in gently at this point: "I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine." Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.
Lanley could not see that he had had anything to reproach himself with in regard to his daughter's first marriage. They had been young, of course; all the better. He had known the Severances for years; and Joe was handsome, hard working, had rowed on his crew, and every one spoke well of him.
"I'll come and see you about half-past ten tomorrow morning," he said very clearly, so that every one could hear. Adelaide looked blank; she was thinking that on Pringle she could absolutely depend. Wayne saw his mother and Lanley bow to each other, and the next moment he had contrived to get her out of the house. Mathilde rushed away to her own room, and Adelaide and her father were left alone.
He felt attacked, insulted; and yet he also felt vivified and encouraged. He felt as he might have felt if some one, unbidden, had cut a vista on the Lanley estates, first outraged in his sense of property, but afterward delighted with the widened view and the fresher breeze.
"In spite of the disabilities of age, Mr. Wayne," she said, "I find I usually can get a simple idea if clearly presented." "Why, how absurd that is, Wayne!" put in Mr. Lanley. "You don't mean to say that you told Mrs. Farron you were going to elope with her daughter, and she didn't take in what you said?" "And yet that is just what took place."
As she held herself aloof from the conversation she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr. Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her unimpeded departure just before luncheon.
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