________________________________________________
_ AS Mrs. Quentin's victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park
into Fifth Avenue, she divined her son's tall figure walking ahead
of her in the twilight. His long stride covered the ground more
rapidly than usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going
home at that hour, it was because he wanted to see her.
Mrs. Quentin, though not a fanciful woman, was sometimes aware of a
sixth sense enabling her to detect the faintest vibrations of her
son's impulses. She was too shrewd to fancy herself the one mother
in possession of this faculty, but she permitted herself to think
that few could exercise it more discreetly. If she could not help
overhearing Alan's thoughts, she had the courage to keep her
discoveries to herself, the tact to take for granted nothing that
lay below the surface of their spoken intercourse: she knew that
most people would rather have their letters read than their
thoughts. For this superfeminine discretion Alan repaid her
by--being Alan. There could have been no completer reward. He was
the key to the meaning of life, the justification of what must have
seemed as incomprehensible as it was odious, had it not
all-sufficingly ended in himself. He was a perfect son, and Mrs.
Quentin had always hungered for perfection.
Her house, in a minor way, bore witness to the craving. One felt it
to be the result of a series of eliminations: there was nothing
fortuitous in its blending of line and color. The almost morbid
finish of every material detail of her life suggested the
possibility that a diversity of energies had, by some pressure of
circumstance, been forced into the channel of a narrow
dilettanteism. Mrs. Quentin's fastidiousness had, indeed, the flaw
of being too one-sided. Her friends were not always worthy of the
chairs they sat in, and she overlooked in her associates defects she
would not have tolerated in her bric-a-brac. Her house was, in fact,
never so distinguished as when it was empty; and it was at its best
in the warm fire-lit silence that now received her.
Her son, who had overtaken her on the door-step, followed her into
the drawing-room, and threw himself into an armchair near the fire,
while she laid off her furs and busied herself about the tea table.
For a while neither spoke; but glancing at him across the kettle,
his mother noticed that he sat staring at the embers with a look she
had never seen on his face, though its arrogant young outline was as
familiar to her as her own thoughts. The look extended itself to his
negligent attitude, to the droop of his long fine hands, the
dejected tilt of his head against the cushions. It was like the
moral equivalent of physical fatigue: he looked, as he himself would
have phrased it, dead-beat, played out. Such an air was so foreign
to his usual bright indomitableness that Mrs. Quentin had the sense
of an unfamiliar presence, in which she must observe herself, must
raise hurried barriers against an alien approach. It was one of the
drawbacks of their excessive intimacy that any break in it seemed a
chasm.
She was accustomed to let his thoughts circle about her before they
settled into speech, and she now sat in motionless expectancy, as
though a sound might frighten them away.
At length, without turning his eyes from the fire, he said: "I'm so
glad you're a nice old-fashioned intuitive woman. It's painful to
see them think."
Her apprehension had already preceded him. "Hope Fenno--?" she
faltered.
He nodded. "She's been thinking--hard. It was very painful--to me,
at least; and I don't believe she enjoyed it: she said she didn't."
He stretched his feet to the fire. "The result of her cogitations is
that she won't have me. She arrived at this by pure
ratiocination--it's not a question of feeling, you understand. I'm
the only man she's ever loved--but she won't have me. What novels
did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns
on that. If she'd been brought up on Trollope and Whyte-Melville,
instead of Tolstoi and Mrs. Ward, we should have now been vulgarly
sitting on a sofa, trying on the engagement-ring."
Mrs. Quentin at first was kept silent by the mother's instinctive
anger that the girl she has not wanted for her son should have dared
to refuse him. Then she said, "Tell me, dear."
"My good woman, she has scruples."
"Scruples?"
"Against the paper. She objects to me in my official capacity as
owner of the _Radiator_."
His mother did not echo his laugh.
"She had found a solution, of course--she overflows with expedients.
I was to chuck the paper, and we were to live happily ever afterward
on canned food and virtue. She even had an alternative ready--women
are so full of resources! I was to turn the _Radiator_ into an
independent organ, and run it at a loss to show the public what a
model newspaper ought to be. On the whole, I think she fancied this
plan more than the other--it commended itself to her as being more
uncomfortable and aggressive. It's not the fashion nowadays to be
good by stealth."
Mrs. Quentin said to herself, "I didn't know how much he cared!"
Aloud she murmured, "You must give her time."
"Time?"
"To move out the old prejudices and make room for new ones."
"My dear mother, those she has are brand-new; that's the trouble
with them. She's tremendously up-to-date. She takes in all the moral
fashion-papers, and wears the newest thing in ethics."
Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of his metaphor. "Is
she so very religious?"
"You dear archaic woman! She's hopelessly irreligious; that's the
difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything:
there's the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl's faith
in the Deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to inspire her with
confidence. She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it's
her duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you're not
obsolete, or whether the text isn't corrupt, or somebody hasn't
proved conclusively that you never existed, anyhow."
Mrs. Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of
implications and assumptions where the lightest word may shake down
the dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes
more difficult between them than had their union been less close.
Presently she ventured, "It's impossible?"
"Impossible?"
She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip
and inflict a cut. "What she suggests."
Her son, raising himself, turned to look at her for the first time.
Their glance met in a shock of comprehension. He was with her
against the girl, then! Her satisfaction overflowed in a murmur of
tenderness.
"Of course not, dear. One can't change--change one's life...."
"One's self," he emended. "That's what I tell her. What's the use of
my giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?"
The psychological distinction attracted her. "Which is it she minds
most?"
"Oh, the paper--for the present. She undertakes to modify the point
of view afterward. All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy:
the gift of grace will come later."
Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup. Her son's first
words had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in
the thick of a crowd that he could not see. It was horrible to feel
herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if
anything could have increased her misery it would have been the
discovery that her ghosts had become visible.
As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, "And
you--?"
His answer carried the shock of an evocation. "I merely asked her
what she thought of _you_."
"Of me?"
"She admires you immensely, you know."
For a moment Mrs. Quentin's cheek showed the lingering light of
girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the
transmitter's merit. "Well--?" she smiled.
"Well--you didn't make my father give up the _Radiator_, did you?"
His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: "She never comes
here. How can she know me?"
"She's so poor! She goes out so little." He rose and leaned against
the mantel-piece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze
wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish
ivories. "And then her mother--" he added, as if involuntarily.
"Her mother has never visited me," Mrs. Quentin finished for him.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll.
Her rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother's sampler."
"But the daughter is so modern--and yet--"
"The result is the same? Not exactly. _She_ admires you--oh,
immensely!" He replaced the bronze and turned to his mother with a
smile. "Aren't you on some hospital committee together? What
especially strikes her is your way of doing good. She says
philanthropy is not a line of conduct, but a state of mind--and it
appears that you are one of the elect."
As, in the vague diffusion of physical pain, relief seems to come
with the acuter pang of a single nerve, Mrs. Quentin felt herself
suddenly eased by a rush of anger against the girl. "If she loved
you--" she began.
His gesture checked her. "I'm not asking you to get her to do that."
The two were again silent, facing each other in the disarray of a
common catastrophe--as though their thoughts, at the summons of
danger, had rushed naked into action. Mrs. Quentin, at this
revealing moment, saw for the first time how many elements of her
son's character had seemed comprehensible simply because they were
familiar: as, in reading a foreign language, we take the meaning of
certain words for granted till the context corrects us. Often as in
a given case, her maternal musings had figured his conduct, she now
found herself at a loss to forecast it; and with this failure of
intuition came a sense of the subserviency which had hitherto made
her counsels but the anticipation of his wish. Her despair escaped
in the moan, "What _is_ it you ask me?"
"To talk to her."
"Talk to her?"
"Show her--tell her--make her understand that the paper has always
been a thing outside your life--that hasn't touched you--that
needn't touch _her_. Only, let her hear you--watch you--be with
you--she'll see...she can't help seeing..."
His mother faltered. "But if she's given you her reasons--?"
"Let her give them to you! If she can--when she sees you...." His
impatient hand again displaced the wrestler. "I care abominably," he
confessed. _
Read next: CHAPTER II
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