Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a
spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and
wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an
admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she
acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no
proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never
spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son
Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were
delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and
sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the
stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For
they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies
could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons
and their sons' wives.

Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs.
Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row,
on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon
coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of
them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her
voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo.

My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no
thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine
about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It
may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his
thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form
a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old
mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been
hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked