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.
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