For a moment, together with
all the others, Lee Randon was outraged; then, with a suppression of
his unorderly amusement, he had a far different conception--he saw
himself, for no easily established reason, in the person of the rebel
who had left behind him the loud announcement of his angry dissent.
Helena sought Lee immediately.
"That's his mother," she said in a penetrating whisper, indicating a
woman with a resolutely abstracted expression and constrained hands.
The children were gathered finally and formed into a line which, to the
drumming piano, moved and halted, divided and subdivided. Led by the
instructor it was involved in an apparently issueless tangle and then
straightened smoothly out. The dancing class at an end, Helena and
Gregory, wedged into the seat with Lee in the car, swept into an eager
chatter, a rush of questions, that he was unable to follow. A Sara Lane
was announced by Helena to be the object of Gregory's affection, and
Gregory smugly admitted this to be true. He was going to marry her, he
declared further.
"Perhaps," Lee suggested, "you'll change your mind."
"Why, Gregory has four girls," Helena instructed him.
"Well," Gregory retorted, "I can marry them all."
But what, under this reflected chatter, was his son like? What would he
be? And Helena! They eluded him like bright and featureless bits of
glass. His effort to draw closer to them was proving a failure; what
could he give them safer than their attachment to the imponderable body
of public opinion and approval? He had nothing but doubts, unanswerable
questions; and a mental, a moral, isolation.
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