# The Green Bay Tree (Bromfield, Frederick A. Stokes Company, printing 11)/Chapter 36

THEN for a long time a silence descended upon the room. Julia Shane crushed out the embers of her cigarette and fell once more to turning the silver mounted reading glass round and round, regarding it fixedly with the look of one hypnotized. At last she turned again to her daughter.
"Are you going to marry him?" she asked.
"No, of course not."
"I should be satisfied, if he is as fine as you say he is. I would rather see you married before I die, Irene."
The daughter shook her head stubbornly. "I shall never marry any one."
The old woman smiled shrewdly. "You are wrong, my girl. You are wrong. I haven't had a very happy time, but I wouldn't have given it up. It is a part of life, knowing love and having children. . . . Love can be so many things, but at least it is part of life . . . the greatest part of all. Without it life is nothing."
For a long time Irene remained silent. She kept her eyes cast down and when she spoke again it was without raising them. "But Lily . . ." she began shrewdly. "She has never married." It was the old retort, always Lily. Her mother saw fit to ignore it, perhaps because, knowing what she knew, it was impossible to answer it.
"You've been seeing a great deal of this Krylenko," she said. "It's been going on for years . . . since before Lily was here the last time. That's years ago."
Irene looked up suddenly and a glint of anger lighted her pale eyes. "Who's been talking to you about me? . . . . I know. It's Cousin Hattie. She was here to-day. Oh, why can't people let me alone? I harm no one. I want to be left in peace."
​Then Julia Shane, perhaps because she already knew too well the antipathy between her coldly virginal daughter and her niece whose whole life was her children, deliberately lied.
"Cousin Hattie did not even mention it." She turned her tyes away from the light. "I would like to see you married, Irene," she repeated. It was clear that for some reason the old hope, forgotten since that tumultuous visit of the Governor, was revived again. It occupied the old woman's mind to the exclusion of all else.
"There is nothing between us, Mama," said Irene. "Nothing at all. Can't you see. We've been friends all along. I taught him to read English. I got him books." Her voice wavered a little and her hands trembled. It was as if she had become a little girl again, the same girl who, in a white muslin dress with a blue sash, sobbed alone on the sofa in the library beneath John Shane's portrait. "I've made him what he is," she continued. "Don't you see. I'm proud of him. When I found him, he was nothing . . . only a stupid Ukrainian boy who was rebellious and rude to me. And now he works with me. He's willing to sacrifice himself for those people. We understand each other. All we want is to be left alone. Don't you understand? I'm just proud of him because I've made him what he is. I'm nothing," she stammered. "I'm nothing to him in that way at all. That would spoil everything . . . like something evil, intruding upon us."
The pale tired face glowed with a kind of religious fervor. For an instant there was something maternal and exalted in her look. All the plainness vanished, replaced suddenly by a feverish beauty. The plain, exhausted old maid had disappeared.
"Why haven't you told me this before?" asked the old woman.
"You never asked me. . . . You never wanted to know what I was doing. You were always interested in Lily. How could you ever have thought I'd marry him? I'm years older." Suddenly she extended her arms with a curious exhibitive gesture like a gesture Lily sometimes made when she was looking her loveliest. "Look at me. I'm old and battered and ugly. How could he ever love me in that way? He is young."
​The thin hands dropped listlessly into her lap and lay against the worn black serge. She fell silent, all exhausted by the emotion. Her mother stared at her with the look of one who has just penetrated the soul of a stranger. Irene, it appeared, was suddenly revealed to her.
"Why, you know he's never looked at a woman," Irene continued in a lowered voice. "He's lived in the Flats all these years and he's never looked at a woman. Do you know what that means in the Flats?" Her voice dropped still lower. "Of course, you don't know, because you know nothing about the Flats," she added with a shade of bitterness.
At this her mother smiled. "The rest of the world is not so different, Irene."
But Irene ignored her. "He's worked hard all these years to make himself worth while and to help his people. He's never had time to be bad." Her mother smiled faintly again. Perhaps she smiled at the spinsterish word by which Irene chose to designate fornication.
"He's pure," continued Irene. "He's fine and noble and pure. I want to keep him so."
"You are making of him a saint," observed the old woman drily.
"He is a saint! That's just what he is," cried Irene. "And you mock him, you and Lily. . . . Oh, I know . . . I know you both. He's been driven from the Mills for what he's done for the people in the Flats. He's been put on a black list so he can never get work in any other Mill. He told me so to-night. That's what he was telling me when you stood watching us." A look of supreme triumph came into her face once more. "But it's too late!" she cried. "It's too late. . . . They've voted to strike. It begins to-morrow. Stepan is the one behind it."
It was as if a terrible war, long hanging in the balance, had suddenly become a reality. Julia Shane, propped among the pillows, turned restlessly and sighed.
"What fools men are!" she said, almost to herself. "What fools!" And then to Irene. "It won't be easy, Irene. It'll be cruel. You'd best go to bed now, dear. You look desperately tired. You'll have plenty of work before you."
​Irene pressed a cold, distant kiss on the ivory cheek of her mother and turned to leave.
"Shall I put out the light?"
"Yes, please."
The room subsided into darkness and Irene, opening the door, suddenly heard her mother's voice.
"Oh, Irene." The voice was weary, listless. "I've written for Lily to come home. The doctor told me to-day that I could not possibly live longer than Christmas. I forced it out of him. There was no use in having nonsense. I wanted to know."
And Irene, instead of going to her own room, returned and knelt by the side of her niother's bed. The hardness melted and she sobbed, perhaps because the old woman who faced death with such proud indifference was so far beyond the need of prayer and comfort.
Yet when the smoky dawn appeared at last, it found Irene in her own chaste room still kneeling in prayer before the pink and blue Sienna Virgin.
"Oh, Blessed Virgin," she prayed, from the summit of her complacency. "Forgive my mother her sins of pride and her lack of charity. Forgive my sister her weakness of the flesh. Enter into their hearts and make them good women. Make them worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Enter into the heart of my sister and cleanse her. Make her a good woman . . . a pure woman, loving only those things which are holy. Cleanse her of the lusts of the flesh!"
Her pale eyes were wet with tears. Although she prayed to a plaster Virgin in pink gilt, she used the sonorous rolling words drawn all unconsciously from the memories of a Presbyterian childhood. And the Lily for whom she prayed . . . the Lily who had been sent for . . . was there in the old house just as she was always in the Town and in the memories of those who knew her beauty, her tolerance and her charm. There were, indeed, times when Krylenko, caught perhaps in the memory of a night when he stood in the melting snow peering into the windows of Shane's Castle, spoke of her; and these were times when Irene turned away from him, frightened by the shadow of something in his eyes.