"If Mr. Carstyle had chosen," that lady repeated, "we might have had our city home" (she never used so small a word as town) "and Ireen could have mixed in the society to which I myself was accustomed at her age." Her sigh pointed unmistakably to a past when young men had come to luncheon to see her.
The sigh led Vibart to look at her, and the look led him to the unwelcome conclusion that Irene "took after" her mother. It was certainly not from the sapless paternal stock that the girl had drawn her warm bloom: Mrs. Carstyle had contributed the high lights to the picture.
Mrs. Carstyle caught his look and appropriated it with the complacency of a vicarious beauty. She was quite aware of the value of her appearance as guaranteeing Irene's development into a fine woman.
"But perhaps," she continued, taking up the thread of her explanation, "you have heard of Mr. Carstyle's extraordinary hallucination. Mr. Carstyle knows that I call it so--as I tell him, it is the most charitable view to take."
She looked coldly at the threadbare sofa and indulgently at the young man who filled a corner of it.
"You may think it odd, Mr. Vibart, that I should take you into my confidence in this way after so short an acquaintance, but somehow I can't help regarding you as a friend already. I believe in those intuitive sympathies, don't you? They have never misled me--" her lids drooped retrospectively--"and besides, I always tell Mr. Carstyle that on this point I will have no false pretences. Where truth is concerned I am inexorable, and I consider it my duty to let our friends know that our restricted way of living is due entirely to choice--to Mr. Carstyle's choice. When I married Mr. Carstyle it was with the expectation of living in New York and of keeping my carriage; and there is no reason for our not doing so--there is no reason, Mr. Vibart, why my daughter Ireen should have been denied the intellectual advantages of foreign travel. I wish that to be understood. It is owing to her father's deliberate choice that Ireen and I have been imprisoned in the narrow limits of Millbrook society. For myself I do not complain. If Mr. Carstyle chooses to place others before his wife it is not for his wife to repine. His course may be noble--Quixotic; I do not allow myself to pronounce judgment on it, though others have thought that in sacrificing his own family to strangers he was violating the most sacred obligations of domestic life. This is the opinion of my pastor and of other valued friends; but, as I have always told them, for myself I make no claims. Where my daughter Ireen is concerned it is different--"