“I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron,” she said aloud, and for her this was the depth of dissimulation.

“Well, then,” said Adelaide, “you and I are in about the same position, aren’t we?  We are both willing that our children should marry, and we have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance.  We both want time to judge.  But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne?  If we do not take definite action against an engagement, we are giving our consent to it.  I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay only by refusing to hear of an engagement.  Do you see what I mean?  Will you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these young people may have a few months to think it over without being too definitely committed?”

Mrs. Wayne shrank back.  She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.

“But I have really no control over Pete,” she said.

“Surely, if he isn’t in a position to support a wife—­”

“He is, if she would live as he does.”

Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron’s mind.  She looked round her wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone: 

“Live here, you mean?”

“Yes, or somewhere like it.”

Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.  She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this.  She did not want to hurt any one’s feelings.  How could she tell this childlike, optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop?  It wasn’t love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.  She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace or on a tropical island.  It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman who was a woman—­her charm.  She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son wouldn’t really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly provided for her child was part of the very attraction that made him want to take her out of it.  There was no use in saying that most poor mortals were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere.  They had never been goddesses; they did not know what they were going without.  But her child, who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony of poverty.

But how could she say this to Mrs. Wayne, in her flat-heeled shoes and simple, boyish shirt and that twelfth-century saint’s profile, of which so much might have been made by a clever woman?

At last she began, still smoothing her muff: 

“Mrs. Wayne, I have brought up my daughter very simply.  I don’t at all approve of the extravagances of these modern girls, with their own motors and their own bills.  Still, she has had a certain background.  We must admit that marriage with your son on his income alone would mean a decrease in her material comforts.”