Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/311

Rh Heaven knows he had ample opportunity to exhibit this after they were back from Europe.

It was his mother first who came, naturally enough.

"I hope, tremendously, you'll like her," said Keppel, nervously, the day of her arrival. "She's been so fine always to me."

"Will she like me?" was Frances's quick question.

"You're my wife," he laughed—and that, to him, covered the ground.

"That oughtn't to be the real basis of liking," she protested. "She must like me for me if we are to get on."

"Oh, she'll like you," he replied, easily.

At the time of it, Frances adequately and graciously met a situation which on the whole was difficult. Keppel's mother was difficult and rather captious. The fact that the case should have been reversed—that the graciousness, if at all, should have been the other way—was, to Keppel, with his tingling sensitiveness to all the meeting implied, not lost sight of. His mother was to him, above all else—and he saw all there was to be seen,—just that—his mother. He was jealous for her position.

The only admission of it—the disparity between Frances and his mother—that he actually put into words was the day his mother went away. It couldn't well have been harder for Keppel. She called him to her room and took out of her trunk a collar—a thing of magenta velvet and lattice-work and seed-pearls.

"I want to give her something, Richie," she said, embarrassedly; "would she like this?"

The possibilities of its effect on Frances flashed over him completely, but he met the moment bravely.

"I wouldn't, mother," he said, gently. "Frances has so many things of that sort. You keep it yourself—I would if I were you."

"Maybe she's too proud to take it?" his mother hazarded.

"Oh, it's not that—oh no! Only she'd rather have something that you have made yourself."

It was not the notion of any smallness in Frances that might belittle the gift; it was the facing of the fact that he knew, as she would know—hide it as they might,—the awfulness of the collar translated into his mother, which gave Keppel his qualm.

After she had gone, beyond their talk, which had to be all on the outside of things, his mother was a topic Keppel and his wife couldn't very well voice, with truth. The inflicted silence was a tangible hurt to him after that.

Then there were his sisters—he had talked of them repeatedly to Frances. "They're such nice girls," he was always saying. But to her request, "Tell me all about them, how nice they are," he usually gave a vague and laughing answer that rather unprepared her for the meeting. They were nice—his sisters. Nice in a blowzy, generous, red-cheeked, utterly irresponsible way—a way that expressed itself in good-natured jesting, frank curiosity over Frances's life, her habits, her clothes, her fashion of doing her hair, and in an innocent aptitude for hitting hard her most cherished reserves.

"Now that you're in the family," was the phrase oftenest on their lips. Frances came out of Keppel's sisters with a dazed relief at having done her duty and being rid of their noisy affection. Not that she wasn't beautiful during their visit—that was a part of her. For Keppel, after the first vigor of the visit, the home jokes, the eagerness over half-forgotten family escapades, it was all spoiled. To put it candidly, Frances spoiled it for him—unconsciously. He was bewildered at his inability to project what his sisters were to him into his wife. It seemed at first that with all his readiness of tongue he could make her feel about "the girls" as he did—that they were nice. His failure—he had to admit the failure—left him with all his perception of Frances's fineness unimpaired, but it sapped terribly his confidence in himself.

"My cousins from Michigan are coming to town on Tuesday," he told Frances one evening, laughing apologetically.

"What cousins, Richard?" she asked, vaguely.

He was surprised at the interrogation. "Why, you know, dear! I've told you of them so often. My Michigan cousins—Edward and Grace; and they want us to dine with them that night at their hotel." He waited, in spite of himself, at a tension.