“I hope I live long enough,” she thought suddenly, “to see my great-grandchildren.” Steve, on her other hand, was pulling out her chair. She sat down in the gay staccato confusion of talk and laughter. “I hope I live long enough,” she thought solemnly, “to see what happens to everyone. To know they’re safe—”
Just then John Ward upset his glass of water in the nearest nut dish. In meeting the emergency of the moment, Jane forgot to be solemn. Later, she watched Cicily rather closely across the prattling queries and vast gastronomical silences of her grandson’s table manners. Cicily never looked happier—never looked prettier—never seemed to take more trouble to be charming and gay. Jane felt she had been a very foolish mother. There was no need to be profoundly troubled.
IV
I
Jane sat at the wheel of her motor, absentmindedly threading her way through the congested traffic of Sheridan Road. She had just returned to the West from her so-called holiday at Gull Rocks and was running into town to take tea with Isabel at her mother’s.
Jane loved to drive a car and she loved the sense of relief, of escape, of expansion that she always experienced when she had left Gull Rocks behind her. The summer had been difficult. Jane was reviewing it in thought as she rolled down the boulevard. She was thinking of the old, old Carvers, now both over eighty; and of sacrificed Silly, who, a wiry sixty, never left home for an hour; and of Alden, who was such a stuffed shirt, a cartoon of a banker; and of the complications presented by the month in which Robin Redbreast and the twins had been with them, and of how Cicily had not realized when she sent them East with just Molly, the nurse, what it did to an old couple of eighty-odd to shelter three roistering great-grandchildren under their roof for thirty-one days; and of how Stephen still incredibly loved the place, and young Steve, too, and of how they had won seven races together and had been presented with a silver cup at the annual yacht club dinner, and of how delighted old Mr. Carver had been! Like a child, Mr. Carver was, and Stephen, too, and young Steve, over that silver cup! It was absurd of them, but it was very endearing. The summer had had its better moments. Nevertheless, Jane was glad to be home again.
It was a lovely late September afternoon. The lake still held its shade of summer blue. Its little curving waves, so unlike the ocean ones, were breaking and rippling along its yellow beaches. Jane could see them out of the corner of her eye, across the well-kept lawns of the squat, square brick and terra-cotta houses that lined the waterfront. The geometric, skyscraping angles of the Edgewater Beach Hotel loomed up before her.
Curious to think that she had known this waterfront when it was a waste of little yellow sand dunes and scrub-oak groves. Not a house in sight. Just stunted oaks and a few stone pines and sand—sandy roads along which you had to push your bicycle. Your bicycle—your Columbia Safety! It wasn’t very far from here, just south of the old white limestone Marine Hospital, that she had picnicked with André and his father and mother the night that he had asked her to marry him. Asked her to marry him on the moonlit beach that had long since been gobbled up, filled in, and landscaped in the Lincoln Park extension. The very place had vanished, like the boy and girl, who had turned into Mrs. Stephen Carver of Lakewood and André Duroy, academician and distinguished sculptor.
There was a Diana of André’s now in the Art Institute. Jane often dropped in to look at it. Often? Come, now, old girl, thought Jane, challenging with a smile her little mood of sentiment, how often? Twice a year, perhaps. She never found time for the Art Institute as often as she meant to. Still, she never went there without pausing for a moment before André’s Diana.
Flora had never written much about him. More about his young wife, who seemed to be quite a girl. Quite a girl, in the discreet, sophisticated French manner that you read about in books and never quite believed in. Flora had a gift with the pen and Jane felt she knew a great deal about Cyprienne. Cyprienne was thirty-three. There was a lot of talk, Flora had said, about her and a young attaché in the British Embassy. His mother, a grand old dowager, was fearfully upset about it, for there was a name and a title and he was an only son. She was a Catholic, of course, and would never divorce. André was only fifty-two. It was hard on the young attaché. It was even harder, Jane thought, with Victorian simplicity, on André. Flora had never attempted to describe his reactions. Jane knew, however, just what kind of a husband André would be. There was enough of American upbringing in André, enough of Victorian Pine Street, to make him loathe a situation like that. And yet be kind—like all good American husbands who put up with their restless wives.
Restless wives—Cicily. A little unconscious smile played over Jane’s lips as she paused for the traffic light at the entrance of the park and thought of how silly she had been to worry so much about Cicily last spring. The child had written her such happy letters all summer, and the moment she had seen her face, two days ago, at the gate of the Twentieth Century in the La Salle Street Station, she had known that the trouble, whatever it was, had blown over. It was nice for Cicily that Belle had taken that little house in Lakewood. She was full of plans for the early autumn parties. She had bought some pretty
