And on the 22nd,
by a previous and unalterable arrangement, I had come to spend
Christmas with my mother.
I was the only son of a widow; I was all that my mother had. And
lo! I had gone and engaged myself to a girl she had never seen,
and I had kept her in the dark! She would certainly be extremely
surprised, and she might be a little bit hurt--just at first.
Anyhow, the situation was the least in the world delicate.
I walked up the whitened front steps of my mother's little house,
just opposite where the electric cars stop, but before I could put
my hand on the bell my little plump mother, in her black silk and
her gold brooch and her auburn hair, opened to me, having
doubtless watched me down the road from the bay-window, as usual,
and she said, as usual kissing me--
'Well, Philip! How are you?'
And I said--
'Oh! I'm all right, mother. How are you?'
I perceived instantly that she was more excited than my arrival
ordinarily made her. There were tears in her smiling eyes, and she
was as nervous as a young girl. She did indeed look remarkably
young for a woman of forty-five, with twenty-five years of
widowhood and a brief but too tempestuous married life behind her.
The thought flashed across my mind: 'By some means or other she
has got wind of my engagement.
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