“Oh, don’t misunderstand me, dearie,” Mrs. Hunter hastened to cover her hasty statement. “Mind you, I didn’t mean she wasn’t good enough for my Carl but that she didn’t show very good judgment. But that isn’t what I came to talk about. It’s this. Carl, since you and he stopped seeing each other, has taken to staying out nights with all sorts of people and three times this week he’s come home drunk. He’s in such a nasty temper I’ve been afraid to say anything to him and I know there’ll be a terrible scene when his father finds out about his carryings-on.”
“I’m sorry to hear Carl’s acting this way, Mrs. Hunter, but what have I got to do with it?” Mimi, puzzled, asked.
“I was wondering if you’d let him see you occasionally—and—and I thought maybe you cared enough to be willing to do that and see if he would stop. Oh, Mimi, he’s my boy and I want you to help me to save him from himself.”
Mimi did not know what to say. She felt sorry, terribly sorry, for Mrs. Hunter—knowing her, she knew the ordeal through which the older woman was going, imperiously proud as she was, in abasing herself before a younger woman, an outsider, and confessing her weakness, her impotence in saving her own son. On the other hand there was her promise to Hilda. True, Carl had said twice he did not care and would never care for Hilda, but that made her own promise none the less binding. She felt impatience with Carl coming over her. She was not puritanical by nature but Carl’s rapid succumbing to temptation vexed her, he was destroying the ideal she had created in her mind of which he was the embodiment.
Her indecisiveness was due more than to any other cause to her own lack of understanding of the full importance of Mrs. Hunter’s words.