ll rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that
silent figure on the sofa. Rush, in and out of his chair a dozen times,
to flip the ash from his cigarette, to light one for Mary, to hand the
strawberries round again, was tugging at his moorings like a captive
balloon. When he answered a question it was with the air of interrupting
an inaudible tune he was whistling. John still planted before the
fireplace, taking, automatically, a small part in the talk just as he
went through the minimum of business with his tea, seemed capable of only
one significant action, which he repeated at short, irregular intervals.
He turned his head enough to enable him to see into a mirror which gave
him a reflection of his wife's face; then turned away again, like one
waiting for some sort of reassurance and not getting it. Mary, muscularly
relaxed, indeed, drooping over the tea-table, had visible about her,
nevertheless, a sort of supernormal alertness. Every time her father
looked into the mirror she glanced at him, and she rippled, like still
water, at all of her brother's sudden movements.

As for Wallace Hood, one look at him sitting there, as unresponsive to
the spell as the cup from which he was sipping its third replenishment of
tea, would have explained his domestication in that household;--the
necessity, in fact, for domesticating among them some one who was always
buoyantly upon the surface, whose talk, in comfortably rounded sentences,
flowed along with a mild approximation to wit, whose sentiments were
never barbed with passion;--who was, to sum him up in one embracing
word, appropriate.

Mary, in addition to feeling repentant over her outbreak just before
Paula came in, experienced a sort of gratitude to him for being able to
sit squarely facing the sofa, untroubled by the absent thoughtful face
and the figure a little languorously disposed that confronted him. His
bright generalities were addressed to her as much as to the rest of them;
his smile asked the same response from her and nothing more.

Nothing short of an explosion that shattered all their surfaces at once
could have got a single vibration out of him. By that same token, when
the explosion did occur, he was the most helpless person there, the only
one of them who could really be called panic-stricken.

John had, at last, crossed the room and seated himself beside his wife.
He spoke to her in a low voice but her full-throated reply was audible
ever