With her sunny nature, it had not needed a very great effort; but
sometimes, since Peter had begun to grow up, he had dimly fancied a
look of wistfulness in her ever-young blue eyes--eyes of a girl gazing
out from the round, rosy-apple face of a middle-aged woman.
She was always the same in her ways and manner, if it could be called
manner: comfortable and comforting, contented with life as it was,
happy in her children, and putting up gently with her husband;
but--when you had said good-bye to her you remembered the look which
always changed instantly into a smile when it met yours. You
remembered, and seemed to see another woman hovering wraithlike behind
mother's plump figure, as she sat contentedly crocheting those endless
strips of trimming for towels and things--mother as she might have
been if no dominating nature had ringed hers in with an iron fence.
When Peter was up the White Nile, in elephant and lion land, he used
suddenly, mysteriously, to see an irrelevant vision of his mother
just stretching out plump arms to say good-bye to him in his own room
which he had furnished with the mahogany odds and ends that had
started her bridal housekeeping.
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