Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/163

 once more towards the front to make her bow in acknowledgment of the applause. The excitement, the effort, had brought a shell-like color into her subtly modeled cheeks. Once more she looked out into the audience impersonally and then, as she turned to go, unconsciously drawn by the intense gaze of the couple in the second row, her dark eyes dropped to them for an instant's glance of friendly recognition. Madame Garnier felt her son draw a sudden, gasping breath through half-open lips and tighten his hold on her hand.

During the rest of the program her thoughts and plans rose in a busy circling swarm. After all, there were advantages. It might be much worse! Impressionable, sensitive, inexperienced as Jean-Pierre was, it might very well have been some mature married woman in search of a new sensation who had thus caught his first young passion. Or even not his passion at all. Even if he himself had felt nothing, any woman could have victimized him by working on that foolish sensibility of his. If she could make him think—and his mother always had a scared sense of how easy that would be—that she was in love with him, he would never know how to retreat, as more brutal men knew so well how to do. She had always been afraid of some such entanglement as that, in which Jean-Pierre's weakness (in her heart she called it plainly that, and not chivalry or sensibility) would make him a helpless victim of a woman either an old fool herself or a calculating sensualist. Heavens! How many dangers there were in the world for one's son! And sons could not be guarded like daughters, by keeping them under your thumb. There were also, for such a romantic, unworldly boy as Jean-Pierre, all the variations on the Camille theme. How easily some shrewd woman of the demi-monde could have pulled the wool over his eyes! Madame Garnier had no doubts that Jean-Pierre knew such women. Her son was a man like all other men, for all his poetic, high-strung ideas, and had certainly had his part of an ordinary man's life, especially those last two years away from home, irresponsible and alone. Oh, yes, the more she thought shudderingly of the dangers he had escaped, the more harmless appeared this fancy for a school girl. And if his fancy was to