Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had much patience.
Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention; it went with a soft voice and immobile expression.

In this mood Adelaide answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a more congenial ether.

She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like a flash of lightning.
Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself as to ignore them.

She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the menace was beyond her.

She couldn't think of anything to say.
Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced--and she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points--into a state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask recklessly, "Have you been to the theater lately ?" and she would question gently, "The theater ?" as much as to say, "I've heard that word somewhere before," until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning banality and sink out of sight forever.
But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it.