“Here, you send it to her,” he said bitterly to Mary, folding the paper with a frown.  “I don’t feel as if I ever wanted to see her again.  I tell you, Mary, I warn you, my dear, that things can’t go on this way much longer.  I never refused her money that I know of, and yet she turns to this fellow Carter!” He interrupted himself with an exasperated shrug, and began to walk about the room.  “She turns to Carter,” he burst out again angrily, “a man who could hurt me irreparably by letting it get about that my mother-in-law had to ask him for a petty loan!”

Mary, with a troubled face, was slowly, silently setting up a game of chess.  She took the check, feeling like Becky Sharp, and tucked it into her blouse.

“Come on, George, dear,” she said, after an uneasy silence.  She pushed a white pawn forward.  George somewhat unwillingly took his seat opposite her, but could not easily capture the spirit of the game.  He made a hasty move or two, scowled up at the lights, scowled at the windows that were already wide open to the sultry night, loosened his collar with two impatient fingers.

“I’d give a good deal to understand your mother, Mary,” he burst out suddenly.  “I’d give a great deal!  Her love of pleasure I can understand—­her utter lack of any possible vestige of business sense I can understand, although my own mother was a woman who conducted an immense business with absolute scrupulousness and integrity—­”

“Georgie, dear!  What has your mother’s business ability to do with poor Mamma!” Mary said patiently, screwing the separated halves of a knight firmly together.

“It has this to do with it,” George said with sudden heat, “that my mother’s principles gave me a pretty clear idea of what a lady does and does not do!  And my mother would have starved before she turned to a comparative stranger for a personal loan.”

“But neither one of her sons could bear to live with her, she was so cold-blooded,” Mary thought, but with heroic self-control she kept silent.  She answered only by the masterly advance of a bishop.

“Queen,” she said calmly.

“Queen nothing!” George said, suddenly attentive.

“Give me a piece then,” Mary chanted.  George gave a fully aroused attention to the game, and saving it, saved the evening for Mary.

“But please keep Mamma quiet now for a while!” she prayed fervently in her evening devotions a few hours later.  “I can’t keep this up—­ we’ll have serious trouble here.  Please make her stay where she is for a year at least.”

Two weeks, three weeks, went peaceably by.  The Venables spent a happy week-end or two with their children.  Between these visits they were as light-hearted as children themselves, in the quiet roominess of the New York home.  Mamma’s letters were regular and cheerful, she showed no inclination to return, and Mary, relieved for the first time since her childhood of pressing responsibility, bloomed like a rose.