Philip asked, in dismay, “You didn’t give it away did you, mother?”
“Certainly not, my dear. You have brought me up too carefully.”
Then, as they could not pretend to look at the pictures any longer, they went away, too. Their issue into the open air seemed fraught with novel emotion for Mrs. Verrian. “Well, now,” she said, “I have seen the woman I would be willing my son should marry.”
“Child, you mean,” Philip said, not pretending that he did not know she meant Miss Andrews.
“That girl,” his mother returned, “is innocence itself. Oh, Philip, dear, do marry her!”
“Well, I don’t know. If her mother is behaving as sagely with her as you are with me the chances are that she won’t let me. Besides, I don’t know that I want to marry quite so much innocence.”
“She is conscience incarnate,” his mother uttered, perfervidly. “You could put your very soul in her keeping.”
“Then you would be out of a job, mother.”
“Oh, I am not worthy of the job, my dear. I have always felt that. I am too complex, and sometimes I can’t see the right alone, as she could.”
Philip was silent a moment while he lost the personal point of view. “I suspect we don’t see the right when we see it alone. We ought to see the wrong, too.”
“Ah, Philip, don’t let your fancy go after that girl!”
“Don’t you be complex, my dear. You know I mean Miss Shirley. What has become of her, I wonder. I heard Miss Andrews asking you.”
“I wasn’t able to tell her. Do you want me to try telling you?”
Philip laughed sardonically. “Now, I shall forget Thursdays and all the other days, too. You are a very unwise parent, mother.”
They laughed with each other at each other, and treated her enthusiasm for Miss Andrews as the joke it partly was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow him up about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to affect a decent surprise when he came in at the end of an afternoon and declined the cup of tea she proposed on the ground that he had been taking a cup of tea with the Andrewses. “You have really been there?”
“Didn’t you expect me to keep my promise?”
“But I was afraid I had put a stumbling-block in the way.”
“Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you created in me into literary material, and so I was rather eager to go. I have got a point for my new story out of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn’t suffer in meeting the girl he knows his mother wants him to marry. I got on very well with those ladies. Mrs. Andrews is the mother of innocence, but she isn’t innocence. She managed to talk of my story without asking about the person who wanted to anticipate the conclusion. That was what you call complex. She was insincere; it was the only thing she wanted to talk about.”