Mathilde broke in gently at this point: 

“I think you must have liked Mrs. Wayne, Mama, to ask her to dine.”

Adelaide saw an opportunity to exercise one of her important talents.

“Yes,” she said.  “She has a certain naive friendliness.  Of course I don’t advocate, after fifty, dressing like an Eton boy; I always think an elderly face above a turned-down collar—­”

“Mama,” broke in Mathilde, quietly, “would you mind not talking of Mrs. Wayne like that?  You know, she’s Pete’s mother.”

Adelaide was really surprised.

“Why, my love,” she answered, “I haven’t said half the things I might say.  I rather thought I was sparing your feelings.  After all, when you see her, you will admit that she does dress like an Eton boy.”

“She didn’t when I saw her,” said Mr. Lanley.

Adelaide turned to her father.

“Papa, I leave it to you.  Did I say anything that should have wounded anybody’s susceptibilities?”

Mr. Lanley hesitated.

“It was the tone Mathilde did not like, I think.”

Adelaide raised her shoulders and looked beautifully hurt.

“My tone?” she wailed.

“It hurt me,” said Mathilde, laying her little hand on her heart.

Mr. Lanley smiled at her, and then, springing up, kissed her tenderly on the forehead.  He said it was time for him to be going on.

“You’ll come to dinner to-night, Papa?”

Rather hastily, Mr. Lanley said no, he couldn’t; he had an engagement.  But his daughter did not let him get to the door.

“What are you going to do to-night, Papa?” she asked, firmly.

“There is a governor’s meeting—­”

“Two in a week, Papa?”

Suddenly Mr. Lanley dropped all pretense of not coming, and said he would be there at eight.

During the rest of the day Mathilde’s heart never wholly regained its normal beat.  Not only was she to see Pete again, and see him under the gaze of her united family, but she was to see this mother of his, whom he loved and admired so much.  She pictured her as white-haired, benignant, brooding, the essential mother, with all her own mother’s grace and charm left out, yet with these qualities not ill replaced by others which Mathilde sometimes dimly apprehended were lacking in her own beautiful parent.  She looked at herself in the glass.  “My son’s wife,” was the phrase in her mind.

On her way up-stairs to dress for dinner she tried to confide her anxieties to her mother.

“Mama,” she said, “if you had a son, how would you feel toward the girl he wanted to marry?”

“Oh, I should think her a cat, of course,” Adelaide answered; and added an instant later, “and I should probably be able to make him think so, too.”

Mathilde sighed and went on up-stairs.  Here she decided on an act of some insubordination.  She would wear her best dress that evening, the dress which her mother considered too old for her.  She did not want Pete’s mother to think he had chosen a perfect baby.