had argued and pleaded with her son,—attempting at the same time to bring in his uncles to wrestle with him, seeing that his poor paralyzed father was of no account,—and so to make a stubborn family fight of it. But she had been simply disarmed and beaten down by William's sweetness, patience, and good humor. Never had he been so determined; and never so lovable.
It had been made abundantly plain to her that no wife, however exacting and adorable, should ever rob her, his mother, of one tittle of his old affection; nay, that, would she only accept Kitty, only take the little forlorn creature into the shelter of her motherly arms, even a more tender and devoted attention than before, on the part of her son, would be surely hers. He spoke, moreover, the language of sound sense about his proposed bride. That he was in love, passionately in love, was evident; but there were moments when he could discuss Kitty, her family, her bringing up, her gifts and defects, with the same cool acumen, the same detachment, apparently, he might have given, say, to the Egyptian or the Balkan problem. Lady Tranmore was not invited to bow before a divinity; she was asked to accept a very gifted and lovely child, often troublesome and provoking, but full of a glorious promise which only persons of discernment, like herself and Ashe, could fully realize. He told her, with a laugh, that she could never have behaved even tolerably to a stupid daughter-in-law. Whereas—let London, and society, and a few years of love and living do their work, and Kitty would make one of the leading women of her time, as Lady Tranmore had been before her. "You'll help her, you'll train her, you'll put her in the way," he had said, kissing his mother's hand. "And you'll see that in the end we shall both of us be so conceited to have had the making of her, there'll be no holding us!"
Well, she had yielded!—of course she had yielded. She had explained the matter, so far as she could, to the dazed wits of her paralyzed husband. She had propitiated the family on both sides; she had brought Kitty to stay with her, and had advised on the negotiations which banished Madame d'Estrées from London and the British Isles, in return for a handsome allowance and the payment of her debts; and finally she had with difficulty allowed the Grosvilles to provide the trousseau and arrange the marriage from Grosville Park, so eager had she grown in her accepted task.
And there had been many hours of high reward. Kitty had thrown herself at first upon William's mother with all the effusion possible. She had been docile, caressing, brilliant. Lady Tranmore had become almost as proud of her gifts, her social effects, and her fast advancing beauty as Ashe himself. Kitty's whims and humors; her passion for this person and her hatred of that; her love of splendor and indifference to debt; her contempt of opinion and restraint,—seemed to her, as to Ashe, the mere crude growth of youth. When she looked at Ashe, so handsome, agreeable, and devoted, at his place and prestige in the world, his high intelligence and his personal attraction, Ashe's mother must needs think that Kitty's mere cleverness would soon reveal to her her extraordinary good fortune; and that whereas he was now at her feet, she before long would be at his.
Three years! Lady Tranmore looked back upon them with feelings that wavered like smoke before a wind. A year of excitement,—a year of illness,—a year of extravagance, shaken, moreover, by many strange gusts of temper and caprice,—it was so she might have summarized them. First, a most promising debut in London. Kitty welcomed on all hands with enthusiasm as Ashe's wife and her own daughter-in-law,—fêted to the top of her bent, smiled on at court, flattered by the country houses, always exquisitely dressed, smiling and eager, apparently full of ambition for Ashe no less than for herself, a happy, notorious, busy little person, with a touch of wildness that did but give edge to her charm and keep the world talking.
Then—the birth of the boy, and Kitty's passionate, ungovernable recoil from the deformity that showed itself almost immediately after his birth,—a form of infantile paralysis involving a slight but incurable lameness. Lady Tranmore could recall weeks of remorseful fondling, alternating with weeks of neglect; continued illness and depression on Kitty's part, settling after a while into a
