Unhappily, Mrs. Place had returned to England, or Hortense would have confided in her and some futures might have been different. But the warmth of the new love seemed at the time to dissipate the chilliness toward her mother, which, unexpressed to herself, had through the years been increasing in the daughter's heart. So she wrote a long letter full of the beautiful story of the growing happiness, with pages of fervid descriptions of a certain fine young fellow, and importuned her mother to come East at once and to bring her blessing. No such filial warmth had Mrs. Orr ever before known. No such opportunity for a beneficent expression of the high privilege of motherhood had ever been entrusted to her. She responded without hesitation. She did not even wait to read their daughter's letter to her husband. When she reached Washington she summoned the young suitor to her hotel, and succeeded in one masterful quarter of an hour in arousing his violent dislike and lasting contempt. Through diplomacy she got Hortense on the Memphis-bound train. She was determined that her "darling child" should never marry beneath her station, and she talked and talked, drowning her daughter's protests, appeals and objections, in her merciless flow of words. Night after night she would stay with her till after twelve, leaving the poor girl tense, distracted and sleepless. And the habit of sleeplessness developed and with it a painfully abnormal sensitiveness to noises. The cruelly disappointed girl rapidly went to pieces. She craved a woman's sympathy, she longed for a mother's comprehending love, but she soon came to dread even her mother's presence, and formed the habit of burying her ears in the pillows to shut out the sound of that voice which could have meant the sweetest music of all, yet which to her distraught nerves had become an irritating, repelling, hated noise. Then special nurses came; the hot months were spent in the Rockies; several sea-trips were made; twice patient and nurse went East to forget it all in weeks of concerts and theaters in New York. But her inability to sleep was but temporarily relieved, while her antagonism to noises increased. She was then in Philadelphia for six months under the care of a noted neurologist, where she slowly gained considerably, physically, and was sufficiently well to spend a short, social "coming out season" with her parents. Yet the "at homes" and tea-parties and functions in which her mother reveled, never more than superficially interested her.