"Don't!" she cried. "Don't--don't--don't!"
He hesitated, stood regarding her there in the chair, eyes squeezed closed like Iphigenia praying for death when exiled in Tauris.
"Go!" she cried, the wail clinging to her lips.
He felt round for his hat, his gaze obscured behind the shining glasses, tiptoed out round the archipelago of too much furniture, groped for the door-handle, turning it noiselessly, and stood for the instant looking back at her bathed in the rosy light and seated upright like a sleeping Ariadne; opened the door to a slit that closed silently after him.
She sat thus for three hours after, the wail still uppermost on the silence.
At ten o'clock, with a gust that swayed the heavy drapes, her son burst in upon the room, his stride kicking the door before he opened it. Six feet in his gymnasium shoes, and with a ripple of muscle beneath the well-fitting, well-advertised Campus Coat for College Men, he had emerged from the three years into man's complete estate, which, at nineteen, is that patch of territory at youth's feet known as "the world." Gray eyed, his dark lashes long enough to threaten to curl, the lean line of his jaw squaring after the manner of America's fondest version of her manhood, he was already in danger of fond illusions and fond mommas.
"Hello, mother!" he said, striding quickly through the chairs and over to where she sat.
"Thought I'd sleep home to-night, mother."
He kissed her lightly, perking up her shoulder butterflies of green sequins, and standing off to observe.
"Got to hand it to my little mother for quiet and sumptuous el-e-gance! Some classy spangy-wangles!" He ran his hand against the lay of the sequins, absorbed in a conscious kind of gaiety.
"Oh, boy," she said--"Edwin!"--holding to his forearm with fingers that tightened into it.
"Mother," he said, pulling at his coat lapels with a squaring of shoulders, "you--you going to be a dead game little sport?"
She was looking ahead now, abstraction growing in her white face.
He fell into short strides up and down the length of the couch front.
"I--I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother, but--but--oh, hang!--when a fellow's a senior it--it's all he can do to get home once in a while and--and--what's the use talking about a thing anyway before it breaks right, and--well, everybody knows it's up to us college fellows--college men--to lead the others and show our country what we're made of now that she needs us--eh, little dressed-up mother?"