"My dear," she said in answer to Mathilde's question, "your grandfather's
principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been
wonderfully successful. I can get nothing from him, so I'm going myself."

The girl's heart sank at hearing this. Her mother saw things clearly and
definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in
unforgetable words. Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain
books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had
destroyed in one poisonous phrase. Adelaide was too careful of her
personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and
repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost
better--or worse--than mimicry. Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind
and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit
of beginning many observations, "It may strike you as strange, but I am
the sort of person who--" Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when
Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences. "It may strike you as
strange, but I like to feel myself in good health." Mathilde resented the
laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess's defense, yet
sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the
choice of the phrase.

She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against
Pete's mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was
prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly
alter her attitude toward her own mother. That was one of the
characteristics of this great emotion: all her old beliefs had to be
revised to accord with new discoveries.

This was what lay behind the shrinking of her soul as she watched her
mother dress for the visit to Mrs. Wayne. For the first time in her life