Mrs. Weyman’s humoring of her mother-in-law turned almost into merriment. “Hugh’s as far from ordinary as dear Joan herself,” she affirmed. “But it’s not because of either of their gifts or brains or anything of the sort that I want him to get her, if he can. It’s because he happens to be in love with her. He’s been that way ever since she was fourteen and he fifteen, when she came to Tarrytown with her parents, and they bought the Manor from the Careys. You were in India and China those years? It was charming, that boy and girl romance. We thought—we took it for granted—they’d marry the minute they were old enough, and Hugh had a profession. Till Nevin appeared. What girl wouldn’t have her head turned by the attentions of a man like that! Untold wealth, world-famous, and looking like a Greek God. Even being Hugh’s mother didn’t make me blame Joan. It was infatuation, not love, though. She has always loved Hugh. Not been in love with him. Perhaps never that. But loved him. Something deeper than infatuation or mere passion. I have seen it. I know more about Joan than she knows about herself. Hugh’s the first person she always turns to, thinks of. Yesterday, for instance, Michael Schwankovsky met her at the docks and brought her out to Holly. He and two or three other people, almost as important and interesting, are at Holly over the week-end. But just the same, last night she came to us after dinner and stayed an hour or more. She didn’t leave her guests to see _me_, I assure you. It was Hugh. It’s rather wonderful, watching it.”
Grandam stirred restlessly among her pillows. “You’ve never spoken quite so plainly before. My dear Hortense, do you seriously want Joan Nevin, after having married some one else, had two children by him, and inherited his wealth, to marry Hugh now? If she’d taken him the year after Nevin died or even the second year, they might have made something of it. But certainly the time for that has passed. She’s picked him up and thrown him down too many times. It amuses her, of course. No, it’s much deeper than amusement. It feeds her. She’s gorged her vanity on it for years. That’s what she loves in Hugh, his food-value! His romantic, silent, dark devotion. Other people are always falling in love with her, of course. But there’s no one quite like Hugh. There wouldn’t be in the twentieth century. His unchanging passion is the _pièce de résistance_ of her gluttonous vanity. And Joan’s vanity, I’ve noticed, has become herself. It’s absorbed the soul she was born with. I don’t know which is more stupid: to think you’re a great painter when you aren’t even a little artist—or to think you are a real person, a worthy human being, when you are nothing but a mass of festering vanity. If you really want Hugh to marry that, and wake up too late, or never wake up at all, and so prove himself an imbecile—”