“You can’t hold a boy too tight, you know, or else he’ll break away altogether,” old lady Breckenridge would say to Rachael, sitting before a coal fire in the gloomy magnificence of her old-fashioned drawingroom and pressing the white fingers of one hand against the agonized joints of the other.  “I was often severe with Clarence, and he was a good boy until he got with other boys; he was always loving to me.  He never should have married Paula Verlaine,” she would add fretfully.  “A good woman would have overlooked his faults and made a fine man of him, but she was always an empty-headed little thing!  Ah, well”—­and the poor old woman would sigh as she drew her fluffy shawl about her shoulders--"I cannot blame myself, that’s my great consolation now, Rachael, when I think of facing my Master and rendering an account.  I have been heavily afflicted, but I am not the first God-fearing woman who has been visited with sorrow through her children!”

Clarence had visited his mother often in the weeks that preceded her death, but she did not take much heed of his somewhat embarrassed presence, nor, to Rachael’s surprise, did her last hours contain any of those heroic joys that are supposedly the reward of long suffering and virtue.  An unexpressed terror seemed to linger in her sickroom, indeed to pervade the whole house; the invalid lay staring drearily at the heavy furnishings of her immense dark room, a nurse slipped in and out; the bloody light of the westering sun, falling through stairway windows of colored glass, blazed in the great hallway all through the chilly October afternoons.  Callers came and went, there were subdued voices and soft footsteps; flowers came, their wet fragrance breaking from oiled paper and soaked cardboard boxes, the cards that were wired to them resisting all attempts at detachment.  Clergymen came, and Rachael imitated their manner afterward, to the general delight.

On the day before she died Mrs. Breckenridge caught her son’s plump cool hand in her own hot one, and made him promise to stop drinking, and to go to church, and to have Carol confirmed.  Clarence promised everything.

But he did not keep his promises.  Rachael had not thought he would; perhaps the old lady herself had not thought he would.  He was sobered at the funeral, but not sober.  Six weeks later all the bills against the estate were in.  Florence had some of the family jewels and the family silver, Rachael had some, some was put away for Billy; the furniture was sold, the house rented for a men’s club, and a nondescript man, calling upon young Mrs. Breckenridge, notified her that the stone had been set in place as ordered.  They never saw it; they paid a small sum annually for keeping the plot in order, and the episode of Ada Martin Langhorne Breckenridge’s life was over.

Clarence drank so heavily after that, and squandered his magnificent heritage so recklessly, that people began to say that he would soon follow his mother.  But that was four years ago, and Rachael looking dispassionately at him, where he lay dozing in his pillows, had to admit that he had shown no change in the past four—­or eight, or twelve—­years.  Like many a better woman, and many a better wife, she wondered if she would outlive him, vaguely saw herself, correct and remote, in her new black.