Tell me this: together with his conviction that you'd carry the
stage up into heaven, didn't he speak of your retiring?"
The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he
recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical
variety of purposes. "In the end," he insisted, "Peyton will want to
take you to a home in a correct suburb; that conception he'll never get
away from." She answered:
"And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn't think my life is
entirely joyful."
"I don't," he as promptly assured her; "but you will never get away
from it; you will never sit contentedly through long afternoons playing
bridge; you're cursed, if you want to call it that."
"I saw Peyton's child," she said at a tangent. "He had hold of the
nurse's apron in such a funny decided fist. I wanted to hug him, but I
remembered that it wasn't the thing to do. She has that," a shade of
defiance darkened her voice at her reference to Claire.
"Babies are no longer overwhelmingly important," Lee retorted; "not in
the face of emotion itself; they have become a sort of unavoidable,
almost an undesirable by-product."
"They won't be with me," Mina Raff promised.
It was evident to him that she saw herself in the role of a mother; her
face had a tender maternal glamour, her eyes were misted with
sentiment; a superb actress. "A baby of my own," she whispered; "a baby
and a house and Peyton.
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