"Eustace! you are not like yourself," I said. "You almost frighten me."
He took no notice. He seemed to be pursuing some pleasant train of thought just started in his mind.
"So like my mother!" he exclaimed, with the air of a man who felt irresistibly diverted by some humorous idea of his own. "Tell me all about it, Valeria!"
"Tell you!" I repeated. "After what has happened, surely it is your duty to enlighten me."
"You don't see the joke," he said.
"I not only fail to see the joke," I rejoined, "I see something in your mother's language and your mother's behavior which justifies me in asking you for a serious explanation."
"My dear Valeria, if you understood my mother as well as I do, a serious explanation of her conduct would be the last thing in the world that you would expect from me. The idea of taking my mother seriously!" He burst out laughing again. "My darling, you don't know how you amuse me."
It was all forced: it was all unnatural. He, the most delicate, the most refined of men--a gentleman in the highest sense of the word--was coarse and loud and vulgar! My heart sank under a sudden sense of misgiving which, with all my love for him, it was impossible to resist. In unutterable distress and alarm I asked myself, "Is my husband beginning to deceive me? is he acting a part, and acting it badly, before we have been married a week?" I set myself to win his confidence in a new way. He was evidently determined to force his own point of view on me. I determined, on my side, to accept his point of view.
"You tell me I don't understand your mother," I said, gently. "Will you help me to understand her?"
"It is not easy to help you to understand a woman who doesn't understand herself," he answered. "But I will try. The key to my poor dear mother's character is, in one word--Eccentricity."
If he had picked out the most inappropriate word in the whole dictionary to describe the lady whom I had met on the beach, "Eccentricity" would have been that word. A child who had seen what I saw, who had heard what I heard would have discovered that he was trifling--grossly, recklessly trifling--with the truth.
"Bear in mind what I have said," he proceeded; "and if you want to understand my mother, do what I asked you to do a minute since--tell me all about it. How came you to speak to her, to begin with?"