In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood.  With the unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals.  This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it, hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly.  There were tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely tears of self-pity, they were better than none.  Once, in the halcyon summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to cry.

But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate, came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial.  She saw, as with a sudden gift of retrospection, her mother’s long battle with inadequacy, and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought unselfishly, since she knew her mother’s declaration that she could contentedly “go back to nothing” was no mere petulant boast.  It was for her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.

The tears in Elinor’s eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put her back to the window.  Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of emotion.

“Have you set your heart upon this thing, mother?—­but I know you have.  And I—­I have tried as I could to be just and reasonable; to you and Penelope, and to Brookes Ormsby.  He is nobleness itself:  it is a shame to give him the shadow when he so richly deserves the substance.”

She spoke rapidly, almost incoherently; and the mother-love in the woman who was careful and troubled about the things that perish put the match-maker to the wall.  It was almost terrifying to see Elinor, the strong-hearted, the self-contained, breaking down like other mothers’ daughters.  So it was the mother who held out her arms, and the daughter ran to go down on her knees at the chair-side, burying her face in the lap of comforting.

“There, there, Ellie, child; don’t cry.  It’s terrible to hear you sob like that,” she protested, her own voice shaking in sympathy.  “I have been thinking only of you and your future, and fearing weakly that you couldn’t bear the hard things.  But we’ll bear them together—­we three; and I’ll never say another word about Brookes Ormsby and what might have been.”

“O mother! you are making it harder than ever, now,” was the tearful rejoinder.  “I—­there is no reason why I should be so obstinate.  I haven’t even the one poor excuse you are making for me down deep in your heart.”