THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE _By EDITH WHARTON_ THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE OLD NEW YORK FALSE DAWN THE OLD MAID THE SPARK NEW YEAR’S DAY THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON THE AGE OF INNOCENCE SUMMER THE REEF THE MARNE FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE BY EDITH WHARTON AUTHOR OF “OLD NEW YORK,” “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” “THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON,” ETC. _Desolation is a delicate thing._ SHELLEY. [Illustration] D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXV COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1924, 1925 by The Pictorial Review Company PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA My excuses are due to the decorous shade of Grace Aguilar, loved of our grandmothers, for deliberately appropriating, and applying to uses so different, the title of one of the most admired of her tales. E. W. BOOK I. THE MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE I. Kate Clephane was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed. It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in the third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l’Univers: that the morning sun came in at her window, and yet that it didn’t come too early. No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too many lost joys--coming home from balls where one had danced one’s self to tatters, or from suppers where one had lingered, counting one’s winnings (it was wonderful, in the old days, how often she had won, or friends had won for her, staking a _louis_ just for fun, and cramming her hands with thousand franc bills); associated, too, with the scramble up hill through the whitening gray of the garden, flicked by scented shrubs, caught on perfidious prickles, up to the shuttered villa askew on its heat-soaked rock--and then, at the door, in the laurustinus-shade that smelt of honey, that unexpected kiss (well honestly, yes, unexpected, since it had long been settled that one was to remain “just friends”); and the pulling away from an insistent arm, and the one more pressure on hers of lips young enough to be fresh after a night of drinking and play and more drinking. And she had never let Chris come in with her at that hour, no, not once, though at the time there was only Julie the cook in the house, and goodness knew.... Oh, but she had always had her pride--people ought to remember _that_ when they said such things about her....