He kissed Elsie when she said good-by. She lived only a few streets away, and George asked him to sit up for him. When the couple were gone:
"Well?" said Mrs. Fourmy, more to the fireplace than to her son.
"She's too good for George." René thought with dislike of his brother, sitting with his eyes half-closed, taking a too voluptuous delight in the music and showing a too proprietary pride in the singer.
"She suits him," rejoined his mother. "George wants to settle down. So does she. Most people are like that. They settle down, and they think nothing else can happen to them. You're not like that."
"Love songs. You think it's all love songs. They think it's all love songs, or they try to. Warm and comfortable. Oh, but I've seen it too often."
"Why do you keep hinting at things, mother?"
"I wasn't hinting. I know, and you will know, and they never will. I could have screamed sometimes tonight."
"Like? Oh, René, boy, if only you'd grow up and be some use to me!"
"I've been a foolish woman. I've been seeing more hope for George than there ever was."
She took up the box of matches from the chimney-piece and stood fingering it. He hoped she would say more, but nothing came. The disconcerting sense of the otherness of his mother's world played about him, and he felt helpless and rather fatuous.
"Bed's the best place for me," she said. "You don't know how I've been dreading this evening. And it's gone off very well, very well. Good night, my dear. I'm glad you came home to-day."
She astonished him by kissing him on both cheeks, for ordinarily she held up her face and he stooped and pecked at it. To-night there was a kind of suspension of the habits of the household.
He heard her go upstairs, and with surprising celerity get into bed. Then he sat alone waiting in the dim, jaded dining-room, with the enormous table designed for a hospitality which was never given, and the corner cupboard which had been in all the houses the family had inhabited, and the hanging smoker's cabinet over the mantelpiece which was used as a medicine chest, and the absurd knick-knacks his father had collected, and the plaques his father had painted with apples and cherry-blossom and bulrushes. There was so much in the room that spoke of his father. The whisky and the boxes of cigarettes used to be kept in the corner cupboard. On the table he had helped his father to make the screen out of old Christmas numbers and colored plates of the _Graphic_ and _Illustrated London News_, which had given him employment during the whole of one winter. And he was stirred by the memory of the emotions that must have been behind his mother's strange incoherence, and he told himself that she had suffered, and that his father was to blame for it all and could meet with no fate too harsh.