He left the room as if he had said nothing remarkable.  But it was remarkable, in Adelaide’s experience, that he should avoid any responsibility, and even more so that he should shift it to her shoulders.  For an instant she faced the possibility, the most terrible of any that had occurred to her, that the balance was changing between them; that she, so willing to be led, was to be forced to guide.  She had seen it happen so often between married couples—­the weight of character begin on one side of the scale, and then slowly the beam would shift.  Once it had happened to her.  Was it to happen again?  No, she told herself; never with Farron.  He would command or die, lead her or leave her.

Mathilde knocked at her door, as she did every morning as soon as her stepfather had gone down town.  She had had an earlier account of Mr. Lanley’s interview.  It had read: 

“Dearest girl: 

“The great discussion did not go very well, apparently.  The opinion prevails at the moment that no engagement can be allowed to exist between us.  I feel as if they were all meeting to discuss whether or not the sun is to rise to-morrow morning.  You and I, my love, have special information that it will.”

After this it needed no courage to go down and hear her mother’s account of the interview.  Adelaide was still in bed, but one long, pointed fingertip, pressed continuously upon the dangling bell, a summons that had long since lost its poignancy for the temperamental Lucie, indicated that she was about to get up.

“My dear,” she said in answer to Mathilde’s question, “your grandfather’s principal interest seems to be to tell me nothing at all, and he has been wonderfully successful.  I can get nothing from him, so I’m going myself.”

The girl’s heart sank at hearing this.  Her mother saw things clearly and definitely, and had a talent for expressing her impressions in unforgetable words.  Mathilde could still remember with a pang certain books, poems, pictures, and even people whose charms her mother had destroyed in one poisonous phrase.  Adelaide was too careful of her personal dignity to indulge in mimicry, but she had a way of catching and repeating the exact phrasing of some foolish sentence that was almost better—­or worse—­than mimicry.  Mathilde remembered a governess, a kind and patient person of whom Adelaide had greatly wearied, who had a habit of beginning many observations, “It may strike you as strange, but I am the sort of person who—­” Mathilde was present at luncheon one day when Adelaide was repeating one of these sentences.  “It may strike you as strange, but I like to feel myself in good health.”  Mathilde resented the laughter that followed, and sprang to her governess’s defense, yet sickeningly soon she came to see the innocent egotism that directed the choice of the phrase.

She felt as if she could not bear this process to be turned against Pete’s mother, not because it would alter the respectful love she was prepared to offer this unknown figure, but because it might very slightly alter her attitude toward her own mother.  That was one of the characteristics of this great emotion:  all her old beliefs had to be revised to accord with new discoveries.