"That's what I tell her. What's the use of
my giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?"
The psychological distinction attracted her. "Which is it she minds
most?"
"Oh, the paper--for the present. She undertakes to modify the point
of view afterward. All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy:
the gift of grace will come later."
Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup. Her son's first
words had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in
the thick of a crowd that he could not see. It was horrible to feel
herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if
anything could have increased her misery it would have been the
discovery that her ghosts had become visible.
As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, "And
you--?"
His answer carried the shock of an evocation. "I merely asked her
what she thought of _you_."
"Of me?"
"She admires you immensely, you know."
For a moment Mrs. Quentin's cheek showed the lingering light of
girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the
transmitter's merit. "Well--?" she smiled.
"Well--you didn't make my father give up the _Radiator_, did you?"
His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: "She never comes
here. How can she know me?"
"She's so poor! She goes out so little." He rose and leaned against
the mantel-piece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze
wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish
ivories.
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