"I don’t know," she said slowly. "I seem to have stopped inside."
He went and put his arms round her. She was passive as a doll. "Why, you’re quite cold, child!"
She shivered. "No," she said. "Good night."
He was somewhat disconcerted. Then he reflected that she could hardly be expected to give up her whims without a little struggling. "It shows how sweet and good she is," thought he, "that she took it so quietly." And he went to bed in the room across the hall—the room he had been occupying most of the time since three months before Winchie came. As he fell asleep he felt that he had laid "the ghost" and had settled all his domestic affairs upon the proper basis. He slept, but she lay awake the whole night, watching, tearless, beside her dead.
Next morning, after her usual breakfast alone, she took Winchie and went across in the motor boat to her father’s. If she had been led blindfold into that house she would have known, from the instant of the opening of the door, that she was at home. Every home has its individual odor. Hers had a clean, comfortable perfume suggestive of lavender. She inhaled it deeply now as she paused a moment in the front hall—inhaled it with a sudden sense of peace, of sorrow shut out securely. She left the baby in the sitting room with her sister Lal, and sought out her mother in the pleasant old-fashioned back parlor with its outlook on the hollyhocks and sunflowers of the kitchen garden. Mrs. Benedict, a model of judicial sternness, as her husband was of judicial gentleness, sat reading a pious book by the open window. She glanced up as her daughter entered, and prepared her cold-looking cheek for the conventional salute. But Courtney was in no mood for conventions. She seated herself on the roll of the horsehair sofa. "Mother," she said, "I want to talk to you about Richard."
The tone was a forewarning—an ominous forewarning because it was calm. Mrs. Benedict, for all her resolute unworldliness, had been unable to live sixty-seven years without there having been forced upon her an amount of wisdom sufficient to store to bursting the mind of any woman half her age. She closed the heavy-looking book in her lap, leaving her glasses to mark the place. "I don’t think I need tell a daughter of mine that she cannot discuss her husband with anyone."