Synopsis
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Excerpt from book:
" He will be here to breakfast at nine. But I leave you to Hickes now ; we dine in an hour." Mrs Transoine went away and shut herself in her own dressing-room. It had come-to pass.now—this meeting with the son who had been the object of so much longing; whom1 she had longed for before he was born, for whom she had sinned, from whom she had wrenched herself with pain at their parting, and whose coming again had been the one great hope of her years. The moment was gone by ; there had beten no ecstasy, no gladness even; hardly half an hour had passed, and few words had been spoken, yet with that quickness in weaving new futures which belongs to women whoso actions have kept them in habitual fear of consequences, Mrs Trail- some thought he saw with all the clearness of demonstration that her son's return had not been a good for her in the sense -of making her any happier. She stood before a tall mirror, going close to it and looking at her face with hard scrutiny, as if it were unrelated to herself. No elderly fac6 can be handsome, looked at in that way ; every little detail is startlingly prominent, and the effect of the whole is Ust. She saw the dried-up complexion, and the deep lines of bitter discontent about the mouth. '"I am a hag I" she said to herself (she was accustomed to give her thoughts a very sharp.outline), "an ugly old woman who happens to be his mother. That is what he sees in me, as I see a stranger in him. I shall count for nothing. I was foolish to expect anything else." She turned away from the mirror and Avalked up and down her room. " What a likeness !" she said, in a loud whieper:; "yet, perhaps, no one will see it besides me." ,!" She threw herself into a chair, and sat with a fixed look, seeing nothing that was actually present, but inwardly...