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."