They sat down at last on a kind of wide marble platform, which looked down on another restaurant where there dined even more glorious people, none of whom wore hats, who seemed indeed to have stripped for their fray with appetite.  They were nice-looking, some of them, but not like Richard.  She looked proudly round just for the pleasure of seeing that there was not his like anywhere here, and found herself under the gaze of Richard’s eyes, set in Richard’s mother’s face.  Doubt left her.  Here was beauty and generosity and courage and brilliance.  Here was the quality of life she loved.  She found herself saying eagerly, that she might hear that adorable voice and hoping that it would speak such strong words as he used:  “Yes, Marion?”

“Ellen, when will you marry Richard?”

“We’ve talked it over,” said Ellen, with a certain solemn fear.  “We think we’ll wait.  Six months.  Out of respect for mother.”

“But, my dear, your mother won’t get any pleasure out of Richard being kept waiting.  She’d like you to settle down and be happy.”

Ellen looked before her with blue eyes that seemed as if she saw an altar, and as if Marion were insisting on talking loud in church.  “I feel I’d like to wait,” she murmured.

The older woman understood.  In such fear of life had she once dallied, one night long before, at the edge of woods, looking across the clearing at the belvedere, and the light in the room behind its pediment, which sent a fan of coarse brightness out through the skylight into the pale clotted starshine.  With one arm she clasped a sapling as if it were a lover, and she murmured, “He is there, he is waiting for me.  But I will not go.  Another night....”  She had been so glad that there was no moon, so that he would not see her from his window.  She had forgotten that her white frock would gleam among the hazel thickets like a ghost!  So he had stepped suddenly from between the columns and come towards her across the clearing.  It was strange that though she wanted to run away she could make no motion save with her hands, which fluttered about her like doves, and that when he took her in his arms her feet had moved with his towards the belvedere, though her lips had cried faintly but sincerely, “No ... no....”  Such a fear of life was of good augury for her son.  Those only feared life who were conscious of powers within themselves that would make their living a tremendous thing.  She was exhilarated by the conviction that this girl was almost good enough for her son, but her sense of the prevailing darkness of fate’s climate caused her to desire to make the promise of his happiness a certainty, and she exclaimed urgently, “Oh, Ellen, marry Richard soon!”

Ellen turned a timid, obstinate face on this insistent woman, who would not leave her alone with her delightful fears.  “After all, this is my life,” she seemed to be saying, “and you have had yours to do what you willed with.  Let me have mine.”