had hardly been aware; no interviewer had ever dared
approach her; and as he grew older, developing rapidly and more and
more unlike her sons and her sons' friends, they had fallen into an
easy pallish intimacy, were frank to rudeness, quarrelled furiously,
but fed each other's wisdom and were deeply attached. During the war
she had knitted him enough socks and sweaters to supply half his
regiment; and when he had left the hospital after a serious attack of
influenza it had been for the house in Gramercy Park, where he could
have remained indefinitely had he wished.

But in all the years of their intimacy never before had she "broken,"
given a hint that she felt the long generation between them. He found
her more interesting in talk than any girl, except when he was briefly
in love, and her absence of vanity, her contempt for sentiment in any
of its forms, filled him with a blessed sense of security as he spent
hours stretched out on the sofa in her upstairs sitting-room, smoking
and discussing the universe. She was not an intellectual woman, but
she was sharp and shrewd, a monument of common sense and worldly
wisdom. It would be as easy to hoodwink her as the disembodied
Minerva, and it was doubtful if any one made even a tentative attempt.
Clavering wondered which of those inner secret personalities was to be
revealed tonight.

As he stood in the drawing-room waiting for her to come down he
examined for the first time in many years the full-length picture of
her painted shortly before her marriage to James Oglethorpe. She was
even taller than Mary Zattiany and in the portrait her waist was round
and disconcertingly small to the modern therapeutic eye. But the whole
effect of the figure was superb and dashing, the poise of the head was
almost defiant, and the hands were long, slender, and very white
against the crimson satin of her gown. She looked as if about to lead
a charge of cavalry, although, oddly enough, her full sensuous mouth
with its slightly protruding lower lip was pouting. Beautiful she had
never been; the large bony structure of her face was too uncoverable,
her eyes too sharp and sardonic; but handsome certainly, and, no doubt,
for many years after she had stood for this portrait in the full
insolence of her young womanhood. She retained not a trace of that
handsomeness today. Her hands were skinny, large-veined, discolored by
moth patches, and her large aquiline nose rose from her sunken ch