A few months later James Gregory became a convert to her religion.
Charles, the second son, had never wavered from his mother's
faith, and rejoiced with her in this great event. But the first-
born, Warren, as all but his mother called him, to avoid confusion
with his father, was a junior in college when these changes took
place, and when he came home for the long vacation his mother knew
what her cross must be for the years to come. He listened to her
with the appalling silence of the nineteen-year-old male, he
kissed her, he returned gruff, embarrassed answers to her
searching questions of his soul, and he escaped from her with
visibly expanding lungs and averted eyes. She knew that she had
lost him.
Men called him a good man, and she assented with dry lips and
heavy eyelids. Charles died, leaving a young widow and an infant
son, the father shortly followed, and Warren came home from his
interne year, and was a good son to her in her dark hour. When
they began to say of him that he would be great, she smiled sadly.
"My father was a doctor," she said once to an old friend, "and
James inherits it!" But at a memory of her own father, erect and
rosy among his girls and boys in the family pew, she burst into
tears. "I would rather have him with his father, with George and
Charles, and with my angel Francis, than have him the greatest man
that ever lived!" she said.
But if she had not made him a good Catholic she had made him a
good man, and it was a fair and honorable record that Warren
Gregory could offer to the woman he loved. Love--it had come to
him at last. His thoughts went back to Rachael. It seemed to him
that he had always known how deeply, how recklessly he loved her.
He had a thrilling memory of her as Persis Pomeroy's guest, years
ago, an awkward, delightful seventeen-year-old, with her hair in
two thick braids, looped up at the neck, and tied with a flaring
black bow. He remembered watching her, hearing for the first time
the delicious voice with its English accent: "Well, I should say
it was indeed!"
"Well, I should say it was indeed!" Across more than ten years he
recalled the careless, crisp little answer to some comment from
Persis, his first precious memory of Rachael. The girls, he
remembered, were supposedly too young for a certain dance that was
imminent, they were opposing their youthful petulance--baffled
roses and sunshine--to Mrs. Pomeroy's big, placid negatives.
Gregory could still see the matron's comfortably shaking head, see
Persis attacking again and again like a frantic butterfly, and see
"the little English girl," perched on the porch rail, looking from
mother to daughter smilingly, with her blue, serious eyes.