The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton Page B

the poplar leaves, they found a workmen’s café open in the next town. There four boisterous women in wet clothes caused a sensation and the patron insisted they have a fine , on the house, with their coffee. Nothing, my mother said, had ever tasted as good as that café au lait with brandy.
    None of the four had been in the Dordogne, where they were bound. Mother’s eyes shone when she described the winding river with a fairy-tale castle around every bend, and the fortified towns, bastides , on the crests of hills, the Romanesque churches, the whole peace-inducing landscape. It had clearly been a kind of heaven. At night in the hotel they read history aloud and Jane, of course, acted everything out.
    â€œShe is such a romantic!” my mother said, “and lives in what she is seeing or reading in such an extraordinary way—oh what a marvelous time she gave me, Cam, the generosity of it!”
    I could see what the trip had done for my mother, but in those weeks I too had been plunged into a new and electrifying experience that actually changed my life for the next ten years and that, for a time, made Jane Reid and her romantic ways distant from my own preoccupations. I was fifteen, and I think I guessed that in some ways I was already older than Jane Reid would ever be, or perhaps simply more vulnerable and more conflicted. Perhaps, too, I recognized that Jane and my mother had become intimate friends. Sometimes when I got back from school Jane was there for tea … she had a way of turning up when Mother was feeling lonely and anxious … and then I would sneak upstairs on the pretense that I had homework to do, and leave them alone.
    I was learning about Jane then at one remove. From little things Mother let fall I gathered that Sam Dawson, active in the founding of the League of Nations, very much wanted to marry Jane and was pursuing her quite relentlessly. We talked about it over supper one evening. It made me feel very grown-up to be confided in.
    â€œThey share a great deal,” Mother said thoughtfully. “Jane’s idealism and her passionate interest in the League … but …”
    â€œBut what? Why doesn’t she marry him?” I felt somehow cross at the thought that she might marry.
    â€œI really don’t know. I think she is sometimes tempted but then she is so involved in the school and in doing everything she can for Miss Thompson.”
    â€œWhy couldn’t she teach and marry too?”
    Mother smiled, the smile, I thought, of someone involved in a secret world. “Warren devours its teachers. I don’t think you have any idea how hard we work.” I did often see how tired Mother was when she got home, but she was older than Jane, and Jane had never seemed tired. “Besides,” Mother went on, “she would be expected to give dinner parties and go out a lot, and, unless they were separated half the year, go over to Geneva.”
    â€œDo you think she could be happy being so social?” I asked. It was all appalling, impossible, not to be believed.
    â€œDarling child, who knows?”
    â€œYou don’t really think she’ll marry him?”
    Mother looked at me in that tender amused way she did when I knew she loved me a lot, “You don’t want her to, do you?” Then she laughed, “And I don’t know that I do myself.”
    â€œI want her to stay just as she is.” I was amazed at the violence of my feelings. For after all why shouldn’t she marry? That was the normal thing for a beautiful woman and an heiress, most people would think. What was it, then, that made marriage for Jane Reid seem preposterous? I couldn’t have said.
    â€œWell, that’s all very well, but none of us stay as we once were … there is old age, loneliness.…”
    â€œOh Mother, don’t be so dreary.…” I had said it in a sharp tone and saw at once that I had hurt her, so I went and