hair.

Overeager to emphasize her realization of the change in her
relationship to Joan, overanxious to let it be seen at once that she
was merely an affectionate and interested visitor and not a mother
with a budget of suggestions and corrections and rearrangements,
Mrs. Harley added to the complication. Usually the most natural
woman in the world with a soft infectious laugh, a rather shrewd
humor and a neat gift of comment, she assumed a metallic
artificiality that distressed herself and surprised Joan. She
babbled about absolutely nothing by the yard, talked over George's
halting but gallant attempts to make things easy like any Clubwoman,
and in an ultra-scrupulous endeavor to treat Joan as if she were a
woman of the world, long emancipated from maternal apron strings,
said things to her, inane, insincere things, that she would not have
said to a complete stranger on the veranda of a summer hotel or the
sun deck of a transatlantic liner. She hated herself and was
terrified.

For two reasons this unexpected lunch was an ordeal so far as Joan
was concerned. She remembered how antagonistic she had been to
Harley under the first rough shock of her mother's startling and
what then had appeared to be disloyal aberration, and wanted to make
up for it to the big, simple, uncomfortable man who was so obviously
in love. Also she was still all alone in the mental chaos into which
everything that had happened last night had conspired to plunge her
and was trying, with every atom of courage that she possessed, to
hide the fact from her mother's quick solicitous eyes. SHE of all
people must not know that Martin had gone away or find the loose end
of her married life!