Catherine Brace walked slowly from the mantel-piece to the open window and back again. Within the last hour she had done that many times, always to halt before the mantel and gaze at the oblong, grey envelope that leaned against the clock. Evidently, she regarded it as a powerful agency. An observer would have perceived that she saw tremendous things come out of it – and that she considered them with mingled satisfaction and defiance.
Her attitude, however, betrayed no hint of hesitation. Rather, the fixity of her gaze and the intensity of her mental concentration threw into high relief the hardness of her personality. She was singularly devoid of that quality which is generally called feminine softness.
And she was a forceful woman. She had power. It was in her lean, high-shouldered, ungraceful figure. It was in her thin, mobile lips and her high-bridged nose with its thin, clean-cut nostrils. She impressed herself upon her environment. Standing there at the mantel, her hands clasped behind her, she was so caught up by the possibilities of the future that she succeeded in imparting to the grey envelope an almost animate quality.
She became aware once more of voices in the next room: a man's light baritone in protest, followed by the taunt of her daughter's laugh. Although she left the mantel with lithe, swift step, it was with unusual deliberation that she opened the communicating door.
Her voice was free of excitement when, ignoring her daughter's caller, she said:
"Mildred, just a moment, please."
Mildred came in and closed the door. Her mother, now near the window across the room, looked first at her and then at the grey envelope.
"I thought," Mrs. Brace said, "you'd forgotten you were going to mail it."
"Why didn't you mail it yourself?" The tone of that was cool insolence.
Mother and daughter were strikingly alike – hair piled high in a wide wave above the forehead; black eyes too restless, but of that gleaming brilliance which heralds a refusal to grow old. So far, however, the daughter's features had not assumed an aspect of sharpness, like the mother's. One would have appraised the older woman vindictive – malevolent, possibly.
But in the younger face the mouth greatly softened, almost concealed, this effect of calculating hardness. Mildred Brace's lips had a softness of line, a vividness of colouring that indicated emotional depths utterly foreign to her mother.
They bore themselves now as if they commented on a decision already reached, a momentous step to which they had given immense consideration.
"I didn't mail it," Mrs. Brace answered her daughter's query, "because I knew, if you mailed it, you'd do as you'd said you wanted to do."
There was frank emphasis on the "said."
"Your feet don't always follow your intelligence, you know."
"I've been thinking about the thing," Mildred retorted, looking over her mother's shoulder into the summer night. "What's the use?"
"What's the use!" Mrs. Brace echoed, incredulous.
"Just that."
"We've been all over it! You know what it means to you – to both of us."
They spoke in low tones, careful that the man in the living room should not hear.
"My dear mother," Mildred said, with a return of her cool insolence, "you display a confidence hardly warranted by your – and our – man-experience."
She yawned slightly.
There was a harsher note in her mother's reply.
"He can't refuse. He can't!"
Mildred stared at the grey envelope a full three minutes. Mrs. Brace, wordless, showing no uneasiness as to the outcome, waited for her to speak.
"It's no use, mother," she said at last. "We can't manage it – him – this thing. It's too late."
The flat finality, the dreariness, of that announcement angered the older woman. Calmness fell from her. She came away from the window slowly, her hands clasped tightly at her back, the upper part of her body bending forward a little, her thin nostrils expanding and contracting to the force of her hurried breathing like leaves shaken in the wind. The curl of her thin lips added a curious ferocity to the words that passed them. She spoke, only when her face was within a few inches of Mildred's.
"No use!" she said contemptuously, her lowered voice explosive with passion. "Why? And why too late? Have you no self-respect, no will, no firmness? Are you all jelly and – "
She got hold of herself with remarkable effectiveness, throwing off the signs of her wrath as suddenly as they had appeared. She retreated a step and laughed, without mirth.
"Oh, well," she said, "it's your party, not mine, after all. But, in future, my dear, don't waste your time and mine in school-girl heroics."
She completed her retreat and stood again at the window. Her self-restraint was, in a way, fiercer than her rage – and it affected her daughter.
"You see," she concluded, "why I didn't mail it. I knew you wouldn't do the very thing you'd outlined."
Mildred looked at the envelope again. The pause that followed was broken by the man in the other room.
"Mildred," he called.
Mrs. Brace laughed silently. Mildred, seeing that ridicule, recoiled.
