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Miss Pride, either through Dr. McAllister with whom I saw she was on very good terms (even though he was too “brainy” for her liking and though his liking of her had certain reservations which he had taken no pains to conceal from me) or through her sharp eyes, knew that something was troubling me, and from the first day of her return to the Hotel, I felt her observant gaze upon me, missing nothing, as I served in the dining-room. Forbearing to make any comment when I confessed that I had not read anything in The Atlantic Monthly but the stories and the poems, she gave me a look so discerning that I felt any explanation was unnecessary since she apparently already understood why I had not been able to study out the essays. I was careful to wear an imperturbable countenance whenever she was near-by. If it happened that during the night I had slept badly and had dreamed of Ivan and had wakened to my mother’s presence beside me in the bed, then had been unable to burst from the infrangible circle of my anxiety over her, I was still not so forgetful in the morning as to allow my face to relax into its natural weariness, but instead smiled and walked briskly as I took Miss Pride’s dropped egg in from the kitchen. The effort that went into keeping myself upright and my eyes wide open perhaps imparted to my appearance the very rigidity I had strived for.

It was my misfortune, however, to be caught off guard several times by other guests. Mrs. Prather, for example, a woman of what are called “good intentions,” had come to call on my mother at the very first of the season, for she had heard of Ivan’s death through Gonzales. She was, as are all those with good intentions, democratic, as I had often heard her say. “I do not feel toward my servants as many people do,” she would remark on the veranda. “I think of them as human beings, every bit as good as I am.” In her humanitarian ardor, she called on us one Sunday on her way home from church, crept to the door with a soundlessness which may very likely have been calculated in spite of her charity. She caught me in tears, their cause being vague in my mind now, for I could have been brooding either over Nathan or over my mother. But I explained them to Mrs. Prather as being brought on by headaches from which I was never free. She refused to accept my reason and, offering me a handkerchief which she carried in a tatted pouch and smelled faintly of scent and, as if I were five years old, producing a lemon drop from a paper bag in her pocket, she begged me to tell her “all about it.” I stuck to my guns and she asked then to see my mother, but I replied that she was in mourning and did not wish to speak with anyone.