And laughing in the face of her daughter's horrified protest, the mutinous grandparent retired precipitately to her own room.
Three hours later, Mrs. Cissy Beale went forth to conquer, gowned in a restaurant frock of shadow lace topped by a black tulle hat.
Valentine Landry, greeting her in Cecily's white-and-gold drawing-room, was breezy and radiant. "You're as lovely as ever," he said, as he took her hand; "perhaps a bit lovelier because you are glad to see me."
"I am glad," she assured him; "and it is so nice to have you come before the summer is at an end. We can have a ride out into Westchester, and come back by daylight to dinner."
"And no chaperons?"
"No." She was looking up at him a little wistfully. "We know each other too well to have to drag in a lot of people, don't we? It is the men whom women trust with whom they go alone."
He met her glance gravely. "Do you know," he said, "that you have the sweetest way of putting things? A man simply has to come up to your expectations. He'd as soon think of disappointing a baby as of disappointing you."
His selection of a simile was unfortunate. Mrs. Beale's eyes became fixed upon a refractory button of her glove.
"Please help me," she said; "your fingers are stronger," and as he bent above her hand she forgot the baby, forgot her new estate, forgot everything except the joy she felt at having his smooth gray head so close to her own.
When he had her safely beside him in his big car he asked, "What made you run away from me in Chicago?"
"My daughter came home from Europe."
"I can't quite think of you with a grown daughter."
"Cecily's a darling." Mrs. Beale's voice held no enthusiasm.
Landry, noting her tone, looked faintly surprised. "You and she must have great good times together."
"Oh, yes--"
Mrs. Beale wished that he wouldn't talk about Cecily. Cecily had married before good times were possible. They had never played together--she and the little daughter for whom she had toiled and sacrificed.
Landry's voice broke in upon her meditations: "I should like to meet Cecily."
Mrs. Beale switched him away from the topic expeditiously. He should not see her as yet in the bosom of her family. _He should not_. He should not see Cecily with her air of mature motherliness. He should not see Victor, Cecily's husband, who was ten years older than Cecily and only ten years younger than herself. He should not hear her big son Bob call her "Grandma." He should not gaze upon the pretty deference of Bob's little wife toward the queen-dowager!
Dining later opposite Landry in a great golden palace, Cissy seemed like some gay tropical bird. In her new and lovely clothes she was very pretty, very witty, almost girlishly charming. Yet Landry was conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment. She had been more serenely satisfying in Chicago--not so brilliantly hard, not so persistently vivacious. How could he know that the change was one of desperation? Cissy, as grandmother, felt that she must prove, even to herself, that she was not yet a back number.
With this rift in the lute of their budding romance, they ate and drank and went to the play and had what might otherwise have been an enchanted ride home in the moonlight. But when Landry said "Good-night" Cissy felt the loss of something in his manner. His greeting that afternoon had had in it something almost of tenderness; his farewell was commonplace and slightly constrained.
As Mrs. Beale went through the dimly lighted hall to her room, she met Cecily in a flowing garment, pacing back and forth with the baby in her arms.
"She isn't well," Cecily whispered, as the little lady in the lace frock questioned her. "I don't know whether I ought to call a doctor or not."
Mrs. Beale poked the tiny mite with an expert finger. "I'll give her a drink of hot water with a drop of peppermint in it," she said, "as soon as I get my hat off, and you'd better go back to bed, Cecily; you aren't well enough to worry with her."
Cecily looked relieved. "I was worried," she confessed. "It's nurse's night out and Victor had to go to a board meeting unexpectedly--and with you away--I lost my nerve. It seemed dreadful to be alone, mother."
Mrs. Beale knew how dreadful it was. She had carried the wailing Cecily in her arms night after night in the weeks which followed the crushing knowledge of her husband's infidelity. But she had carried a heavier burden than the child--the burden of poverty, of desertion, of an unknown future.
But these things were not to be voiced. "You go to bed, Cecily," she said. "I'll look after her."
Walking the floor later with the baby in her arms, Mrs. Beale's mind was on Landry. "Heavens! if he could see me now!" was her shocked thought, as she stopped in front of a mirror to survey the picture she made.
Her hair was down and the grayest lock of all showed plainly. She had discarded frills and furbelows and wore a warm gray wrapper. She looked nice and middle-aged, yet carried, withal, a subtle air of girlishness--would carry it, in spite of storm or stress, until the end, as the sign and seal of her undaunted spirit.
The baby stirred in her arms, and again Mrs. Beale went back and forth, crooning the lullaby with which she had once put her own babies to bed.
In the morning the baby was much better, but Mrs. Beale was haggard. She stayed in bed until eleven o'clock, however. Cecily, coming in at twelve, found her ready to go out. In response to an inquiry, Mrs. Beale spoke of a luncheon engagement with Valentine Landry.
"Mother--are you going to marry him?"
Cissy, studying the adjustment of her veil, confessed, "He hasn't asked me."
"But he will--"
Mrs. Beale shrugged her shoulders. "Who knows?"
In the weeks which followed, the little lady was conscious that things were not drawing to a comfortable climax. By all the rules of the game, Landry should long ago have declared himself. But he seemed to be slipping more and more into the fatal role of good friend and comrade.
Cissy's pride would not let her admit, even to herself, that she had failed to attract at the final moment. But there was something deeper than her pride involved, and she found her days restless and her nights sleepless. One night in the dense darkness she faced the truth relentlessly. "You're in love, Cissy Beale," she told herself, scornfully. "You're in love for the first time in your life--and you a--grandmother!"
Then she turned over on her pillow, hid her face in its white warmth, and cried as if her heart would break.
In the meantime the baby drooped. Cecily, worried, consulted her mother continually. Thus it came about that Mrs. Beale lived a double life. From noon until midnight she was of to-day--smartly gowned, girlish; from midnight until dawn she was of yesterday--waking from her fitful slumbers at the first wailing note, presiding in gray gown and slippers over strange brews of catnip and of elderflower.
Cecily's doctor, being up-to-date, remonstrated at this return to the primitive, but was forced to admit, after the baby had come triumphantly through a half-dozen critical attacks, that Cissy's back-to-grandma methods were effective.
It was on a morning following one of these struggles that Cissy said to her daughter, wearily, "I can't escape it--"
"Escape what?" demanded Cecily, who, in the pale-gray bedroom was endeavoring to observe the doctor's injunction to let the wailing baby stay in her bassinet, instead of walking the floor with her.
"The black-silk-and-mitt destiny," said the depressed lady.
"What has happened?" Cecily demanded.
"Nothing has happened," responded her weary little mother, and refused to discuss the matter further.
But to herself she was beginning to admit that she had lost Landry. An hour later she had a telephone message from him.
"I want you to go with me for a last ride together," he said. "I leave to-morrow."
"To-morrow!" Her voice showed her dismay.
"But why this sudden decision--"
"I have played long enough," he said; "business calls--"
As Mrs. Beale made ready for the ride she surveyed herself wistfully in her mirror. There were shadows under her eyes, and faint little lines toward the corners of her lips--it even seemed to her that her chin sagged. She had a sudden sense of revolt. "If I were young, _really_ young," she thought, "he would not be going away--"
With this idea firmly fixed in her mind, she exerted herself to please him; and her little laugh made artificial music in his ears, her fixed smile wore upon his nerves, her staccato questions irritated him.
Again they had dinner together, and as she sat opposite him, gorgeous and gay in her gown of geranium red, he began to talk with her of her daughter.
"I've never met her. It has seemed to me that you might have let me see her--"
Cissy flushed. "She's such a great grown-up," she said. "Somehow when I'm with her I feel--old--"
"You will never seem old," he said, with the nearest approach to tenderness that had softened his voice for days. "You have in you the spirit of eternal youth--"
Then he floundered on. "But a mother and a daughter--when you used to speak of her in Chicago, it seemed to me that I could see you together, and I liked the sweetness and womanliness of the thought; but I have never seen you together."