The question from one who, on this subject of her daughter's upbringing, seemed always inflexibly sure of her own aims, surprised Damier, and its chiming with his own recent thoughts disturbed him. After all, was, perhaps, Claire's gray life an explanation, in one sense, of her ugly clutch at any brightness? Yet the serenity, the sweet, if laborious, dignity of the place her mother had made for her in life, hardly allowed the mitigating supposition. Claire's life was really neither gray nor dreary. He paused, however, for a long time before saying: "From her point of view it probably is."
"I should have liked to give her a larger life, a life of more opportunity, more gaiety. I feel the narrowness of her path as keenly as she does. Not that Claire complains."
"You have given her your best. How could she complain?" Damier was not able quite to restrain the resentment he felt at the idea of Claire complaining.
"Ah, I could not blame her if she did," said Madame Vicaud, her quiet eyes on her work, "for mothers personify circumstance to children; we are symbols, to them, of baffling, cramping fate; very often, and very naturally, we are fate's whipping-boys: and when one is a young and talented and beautiful woman whose youth is passing in giving lessons, in seeing people who seldom interest or amuse her, fate must often seem to deserve blows."
Damier, in the surge of his comprehension,--of which she must be so ignorant and at which perhaps she yet guessed,--longed to throw himself at her knees: her pity for Claire equaled, surpassed his own; and he had--not blaming her for it, thinking it, indeed, the penalty of her superiority--thought her unconscious of Claire's pathos.
"You deepen your shadows too much," he said; "for a daughter more like yourself your life would not be a narrow one." He paused, for, though she did not lift her eyes, a faint flush passed over Madame Vicaud's face.
"I see all your efforts to widen it," he went on, hurrying away from what he felt to have been an unfortunate comparison, "the flowers you strew: intellectual, artistic interests, friends that you hope she may find congenial, your delightful teas."
"Oh--our teas!" Madame Vicaud interrupted, smiling with a rather satirical playfulness. "No; our delightful and 'cultured' little teas can hardly atone to Claire. She should have the gaiety, the variety, the colored experience that I had in my youth. I can well imagine that to Claire's palate the nourishment I offer her is rather tasteless. She needs excitement, admiration, appreciation, an outlet for her energy, her intelligence."