The face of the mother, for all its amazing flexibility, the startled animal-like intentness with which her glance darted from one object to another, and the mobility of her powerful and delicate mouth, which she pursed and convolved with astonishing flexibility in such a way as to show the constant reflective effort of her mind, was nevertheless the face of a woman whose spirit had an almost elemental quality of patience, fortitude and calm.
The face of the younger woman was large, high-boned, and generous and already marked by the frenzy and unrest of her own life. At moments it bore legibly and terribly the tortured stain of hysteria, of nerves stretched to the breaking point, of the furious impatience, unrest and dissonance of her own tormented spirit, and of impending exhaustion and collapse for her overwrought vitality. Yet, in an instant, this gaunt, strained, tortured, and almost hysterical face could be transformed by an expression of serenity, wisdom and repose that would work unbelievably a miracle of calm and radiant beauty on the nervous, gaunt, and tortured features.
Now, each in her own way, the two women were surveying the other people on the platform and the new arrivals with a ravenous and absorptive interest, bestowing on each a wealth of information, comment, and speculation which suggested an encyclopædic knowledge of the history of every one in the community.
“—Why, yes, child,” the mother was saying impatiently, as she turned her quick glance from a group of people who at the moment were the subject of discussion—“that’s what I’m telling you!—Don’t I know?… Didn’t I grow up with all those people?… Wasn’t Emma Smathers one of my girlhood friends?… That boy’s not this woman’s child at all. He’s Emma Smathers’child by that first marriage.”
“Well, that’s news to me,” the younger woman answered. “That’s certainly news to me. I never knew Steve Randolph had been married more than once. I’d always thought that all that bunch were Mrs. Randolph’s children.”
“Why, of course not!” the mother cried impatiently. “She never had any of them except Lucille. All the rest of them were Emma’s children. Steve Randolph was a man of forty-five when he married her. He’d been a widower for years—poor Emma died in childbirth when Bernice was born—nobody ever thought he’d marry again and nobody ever expected this woman to have any children of her own, for she was almost as old as he was—why, yes!—hadn’t she been married before, a widow, you know,
