Grandmother and the Priests
her parents caused them impotent agony. Nor would there be a second marriage. Rose Mary was infatuated, and she was to remain infatuated for all of five years, during which time her four sons were born. Then the infatuation ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Bruce was rarely seen at home any longer. He continued his concert work and died when his oldest son was ten years old, and if Rose Mary mourned him it was not evident.
     
    No one had ever accused Rose Mary O’Driscoll Cullen of being a patient lass, and so she took upon herself the proper bringing up of her sons — whom she had found dull and uninspiring almost from their birth — impatiently. They all reminded her of her husband, of whom she had become unbearably weary long before he died. Now that there was no scandalous husband on the premises, involved in a marriage they considered invalid, the parents of Rose Mary came to her assistance, bewailing her dire circumstances. They were hardly poverty-stricken even from the point of view of modern days, for Rose Mary had inherited two thousand pounds a year at her twenty-first birthday from her maternal grandfather, and Bruce Cullen had made quite a bit of money, himself, on his concert tours of the British Isles, and had made even more money among the sentimental Scots and Irish immigrants in America. It is true that Rose Mary had spent most of the fine money on her own small person, and was adding to her store of jewelry, and that her house — now in Glasgow — was modest and not in a fashionable neighborhood. But she and her children were scarcely starving, though the besotted O’Driscolls felt they were. So they established a fund for Rose Mary, and the equally besotted brothers and sisters added to it. (It is of no consequence, of course, that Rose Mary did not tell her parents that her husband had left her considerable money.)
     
    Rose Mary was humbly grateful and affectionate to her kin for all they had done for her; they missed that green and mocking sparkle in her eye. As she wanted, more than anything else, to get her lads from under her feet, she immediately sent them to public (private) schools far from Glasgow. She then took a grand tour of the Continent to renew old and fascinated acquaintances, and there was an interlude with an Italian gentleman of family of which no one in the Isles had ever heard, nor did they ever know. Satisfied, surfeited, and full of the lust for life, she returned to the Isles, lived in London for a while, then became interested in increasing her fortune through investments. As she was restless, she moved from city to city as time went on, establishing fine homes, then selling them at a sound profit.
     
    Her sons married fairly well, but Rose Mary was not interested either in them or their wives or their subsequent children. She did declare, however, that she had always wanted a daughter, and when one of the sons, the third, did produce a daughter Rose Mary was in temporary raptures, invested the child in her own christening robe, and named her after herself. The child, Rose Mary Cullen, had Grandmother’s own hair, greenish-hazel eyes and general features, but unfortunately she had also inherited her Grandfather Cullen’s sober and dogged personality. So Grandmother lost interest, if she still retained a random affection for her namesake. She remembered the child on her birthday and at Christmas, but saw her infrequently until the little one was about four years old. Grandmother was then living in Leeds in a very fine house indeed, in the very center of a block of houses she was renovating and restoring for later profitable sale.
     
    So it was that little Rose Cullen found herself every winter for considerable periods in Grandmother’s house, whenever her parents had their prolonged and bitter rows. She never quite discovered what the rows were about, and never really cared, for she was a child of silences and solitudes. She accepted life with deep and passionate

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