And as she went Anne heard Eliot saying, "I've sense enough to remember
that her mother's dead."

In his worst tempers there was always some fierce pity.


iii

Mrs. Fielding gathered herself together and rose, with dignity, still
smiling. It was a smile of great sweetness, infinitely remote from all
discussion.

"It's much too hot here," she said. "You might move the cushions down
there under the beech-tree."

That, Eliot put it to himself, was just her way of getting out of it. To
Eliot the irritating thing about his mother was her dexterity in getting
out. She never lost her temper, and never replied to any serious
criticism; she simply changed the subject, leaving you with your
disapproval on your hands.

In this Eliot's young subtlety misled him. Adeline Fielding's mind was
not the clever, calculating thing that, at fifteen, he thought it. Her
one simple idea was to be happy and, as a means to that end, to have
people happy about her. His father, or Anne's father, could have told
him that all her ideas were simple as feelings and impromptu. Impulse
moved her, one moment, to seize on the faithful, defiant little heart of
Anne, the next, to get up out of the sun. Anne's tears spoiled her
bright world; but not for long. Coolness was now the important thing,