Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/137

 "What?" she said playfully. "Are you still awake? Skimming again, I see."

Yet her manner was not the manner of a daughter with a mother. Rather it was that of a casual friend. It was too playful, too forced. The chasm of thirty years and more was not to be bridged by any amount of strained cordiality.

Julia Shane put down her reading glass. "I couldn't sleep, so I tried to read," she said.

Irene drew up a chair and sat by the bed. She appeared worn and exhausted, as though the August heat had drained to the dregs all her intense, self-inspired vitality.

"How are you feeling?"

"Better . . . much better except for the ache in my back."

Irene's face grew serious. "You've been smoking again," she said, "after the doctor forbade you." The old woman, quite prepared to lie, started to protest, shaking her head in negation. "It's no use. Mama . . . I saw you . . . I saw the glow of your cigarette at the window."

(So Irene knew that she had been watched, and there was no need to protest.) The old woman sat still for a moment twisting the silver reading glass round and round, her brow contracted in an angry frown as though she resented bitterly the decay of body which gave any one authority over her. (That Julia Shane should ever take orders from a doctor or stand reproved by her own daughter!) It was this angry emotion that stood revealed and transparent in every line of her face, in the very defiance of her thin body. At length the frown melted slowly away.

"What sort of a man is he, Irene?" she asked looking straight into her daughter's tired eyes. Irene moved uneasily.

"What man?" she asked, "I don't know who you mean."

"That foreigner . . . I don't remember his name. You've never told me. . . . You might have told your mother." There was a note of peevishness in her voice which sounded queer and alien, almost a portent.

"Oh, Krylenko," said Irene, twisting her black hat with her thin hands. "Krylenko." Then she waited for a moment. "He's a fine man . . . a wonderful man. He has given up everything for his people."