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. 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 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. Quentin’s fastidiousness had, indeed, the flaw 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.
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One felt it to be the result of a series of eliminations: there was nothing fortuitous in its blending of line and color.
Her house, in a minor way, bore witness to the craving. He was a perfect son, and Mrs. Quentin had always hungered for perfection. 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. There could have been no completer reward. For this superfeminine discretion Alan repaid her by-being Alan. If she could not help overhearing Alan’s thoughts, she had the courage to keep her discoveries to herself, the tact to take for granted nothing that lay below the surface of their spoken intercourse: she knew that most people would rather have their letters read than their thoughts. She was too shrewd to fancy herself the one mother in possession of this faculty, but she permitted herself to think that few could exercise it more discreetly. Quentin, though not a fanciful woman, was sometimes aware of a sixth sense enabling her to detect the faintest vibrations of her son’s impulses. His long stride covered the ground more rapidly than usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going home at that hour, it was because he wanted to see her. Quentin’s victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park into Fifth Avenue, she divined her son’s tall figure walking ahead of her in the twilight.
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