recoil; and, combined with these two, a silent wish, a gentle resolve to improve Adolphine in one way and another. She insisted that Addie should ask Adolphine’s boys to lunch one Sunday; and, though her nerves were racked and she driven almost mad by their rude manners and coarse voices, she had controlled herself and deliberately played the kind auntie. Addie, sacrificing himself for Mamma’s sake, had gone out walking with his cousins, but had taken the first opportunity of giving the young louts the slip. Knowing his mother’s idiosyncrasies, he did not say much when he returned and even declared that they were not half bad fellows. When his father, however, asked him if he understood why Mamma encouraged those unmannerly cubs, Addie stoically replied, because they were cousins: one of Mamma’s ideas; family-affection. Constance, meanwhile, was so tired of the three young Van Saetzemas that she did not venture to repeat the experiment.
Constance thought Dorine uncertain. Dorine was very pleasant, sometimes, to go shopping with, or would go shopping herself for Constance—it was she who asked, not Constance—and then, at other times, Dorine would be cold and nervously irritable. This was because Dorine had a positive mania for doing all sorts of things for other people, but, at the same time, was always craving for appreciation and never thought that she was sufficiently appreciated by any member of the family for whose benefit she ran about. But the mania was too strong for her; and she went on running about, for Mamma,
