ast night Isabel had
seen her stand for half an hour as motionless as some ivory female
Colossus, only her eyes burning down with slow voluptuous fire upon an
adoring little Frenchman. She had looked like a Messalina petrified with
the complications and commonness of the modern world; possibly with the
burden of years, Isabel had added, in girlish intolerance of the wiles
of which youth is independent. She had been far from falling under her
spell, although not wholly repelled by the glimpse of this worst side of
a woman far too complex to be judged off-hand. This morning she liked
her suddenly and warmly, and, with the lightning of instinct, divined
why she worshipped her son and still was willing to have him marry and
swing aside into an orbit of his own. All she needed was a certain
amount of his society, opportunities to work for him, the assurance of
his success and happiness. He was a refuge from herself; in his
imperious demands her memory slept, her depths were stagnant. But Isabel
was still too young, in spite of her own experience, more than dimly to
apprehend the older woman's attitude, and the innumerable and various
acts and sufferings, disenchantments and contacts that had led up to it.
Victoria seemed to her the most rounded mortal she had met, and yet with
an insistent terror in the depths of her riven and courageous soul, the
terror of the complete, the final disillusion. Between that moment and
her too exhaustive knowledge of life stood the magnetic figure of her
son, safeguarding, almost hypnotizing her. She was as incapable of
jealousy as of aching vanity in the fact of a son whom the world was
never permitted to forget. She had done with little things, and Isabel,
with young curiosity, wondered in what convulsion the last of them had
gone down.

Lady Victoria, unconscious of the analytical mind groping to conclusions
beside her, was revolving the midnight comments of Flora Thangue, and
her own impressions of this American relative whose sudden advent, taken
in connection with her eighteenth century beauty and undecipherable
quality, wrought the impression of a symbolic figure swimming out of
space. Lady Victoria was far too indifferent to analyze the problems of
any woman's soul, but she was keenly alive to the vital suggestion of
power in the girl, and of the strong will and intellect, the command
over every faculty, evidenced in the strong line of the jaw, the stern
noble profile, the calm searchi