Chapter III: Book I: The Mother’s Recompense (3)

Kate broke into a faint laugh. How well she remembered that box! She did not have to lift the lid to see its padded trays and tufted sky-blue satin lining! It was old Mrs. Clephane’s jewel-box, and on Kate’s marriage the dowager had solemnly handed it over to her daughter-in-law with all that it contained.

“I wonder where Anne found it?” Kate conjectured, amused by the sight of one more odd survival in that museum of the past which John Clephane’s house had become. A little key hung on one of the handles, and she put it in the lock, and saw all her jewels lying before her. On a slip of paper Anne had written: “Darling, these belong to you. Please wear some of them tonight....”

* * * * *

As she entered the opera box Kate Clephane felt as if the great central chandelier were raying all its shafts upon her, as if she were somehow caught up into and bound on the wheel of its devouring blaze. But only for a moment--after that it seemed perfectly natural to be sitting there with her daughter and Nollie Tresselton, backed by the usual cluster of white waistcoats. After all, in this new existence it was Anne who mattered, not Anne’s mother; instantly, after the first plunge, Mrs. Clephane felt herself merged in the blessed anonymity of motherhood. She had never before understood how exposed and defenceless her poor unsupported personality had been through all the lonely years. Her eyes rested on Anne with a new tenderness; the glance crossed Nollie Tresselton’s, and the two triumphed in their shared admiration. “Oh, there’s no one like Anne,” their four eyes told each other.

Anne looked round and intercepted the exchange. Her eyes smiled too, and turned with a childish pleasure to the pearls hanging down over her mother’s black dress.

“Isn’t she beautiful, Nollie?”

Young Mrs. Tresselton laughed. “You two were made for each other,” she said.

Mrs. Clephane closed her lids for an instant; she wanted to drop a curtain between herself and the stir and brightness, and to keep in her eyes the look of Anne’s as they fell on the pearls. The episode of the jewels had moved the mother strangely. It had brought Anne closer than a hundred confidences or endearments. As Kate sat there in the dark, she saw, detached against the blackness of her closed lids, a child stumbling with unsteady steps across a windy beach, a funny flushed child with sand in her hair and in the creases of her fat legs, who clutched to her breast something she was bringing to her mother. “It’s for mummy,” she said solemnly, opening her pink palms on a dead star-fish. Kate saw again the child’s rapturous look, and felt the throb of catching her up, star-fish and all, and devouring with kisses the rosy body and tousled head.

In themselves the jewels were nothing. If Anne had handed her a bit of coal--or another dead star-fish--with that look and that intention, the gift would have seemed as priceless. Probably it would have been impossible to convey to Anne how indifferent her mother had grown to the Clephane jewels. In her other life--that confused intermediate life which now seemed so much more remote than the day when the little girl had given her the star-fish--jewels, she supposed, might have pleased her, as pretty clothes had, or flowers, or anything that flattered the eye. Yet she could never remember having regretted John Clephane’s jewels; and now they would have filled her with disgust, with abhorrence almost, had they not, in the interval, become Anne’s.... It was the girl who gave them their beauty, made them exquisite to the mother’s sight and touch, as though they had been a part of her daughter’s loveliness, the expression of something she could not speak.

Mrs. Clephane suddenly exclaimed to herself: “I am rewarded!” It was a queer, almost blasphemous, fancy--but it came to her so. She was rewarded for having given up her daughter; if she had not, could she ever have known such a moment as this? She had been too careless and impetuous in her own youth to be worthy to form and guide this rare creature; and while she seemed to be rushing blindly to her destruction, Providence had saved the best part of her in saving Anne. All these scrupulous self-controlled people--Enid and Hendrik Drover, Fred Landers, even the arch enemy, old Mrs. Clephane--had taken up the task she had flung aside, and carried it out as she could never have done. And she had somehow run the mad course allotted to her, and come out of it sane and sound, to find them all waiting there to give her back her daughter. It was incredible, but there it was. She bowed her head in self-abasement.

The box door was opening and shutting softly, on the stage voices and instruments soared and fell. She did not know how long she sat there in a kind of brooding rapture. But presently she was roused by hearing a different voice at her elbow. She half opened her eyes, and saw a newcomer sitting by Anne. It was one of the young men who came to the house; his fresh blunt face was as inexpressive as a football; he might have been made by a manufacturer of sporting-goods.

“--in the box over there; but he’s gone now; bolted. Said he was too shy to come over and speak to you. Give you my word, he’s got it bad; we couldn’t get him off the subject.”

“_Shy?_” Anne murmured ironically.

“That’s what he said. Said he’s never had the microbe before. Anyhow, he’s bolted off home. Says he don’t know when he’ll come back to New York.”

Kate Clephane, watching her daughter through narrowed lids, perceived a subtle change in her face. Anne did not blush--that close-textured skin of hers seldom revealed the motions of her blood. Her delicate profile remained shut, immovable; she merely lowered her lids as if to keep in a vision. It was Kate’s own gesture, and the mother recognized it with a start. She had been right, then; there was some one--some one whom Anne had to close her eyes to see! But who was he? Why had he been too shy to come to the box? Where did he come from, and whither had he fled?

Kate glanced at Nollie Tresselton, wondering if she had overheard; but Nollie, in the far corner of the box, leaned forward, deep in the music. Joe Tresselton had vanished, Landers slumbered in the rear. With a little tremor of satisfaction, Kate saw that she had her daughter’s secret to herself: if there was no one to enlighten her about it at least there was no one to share it with her, and she was glad. For the first time she felt a little nearer to Anne than all the others.

“It’s odd,” she thought, “I always knew it would be some one from a distance.” But there are no real distances nowadays, and she reflected with an inward smile that the fugitive would doubtless soon reappear, and her curiosity be satisfied.

That evening, when Anne followed her into her bedroom, Mrs. Clephane opened the wardrobe in which she had placed the jewel-box. “Here, my dear; you shall choose one thing for me to wear. But I want you to take back all the rest.”

The girl’s face clouded. “You won’t keep them, then? But they’re all yours!”

“Even if they were, I shouldn’t want them any longer. But they’re not, they’re only a trust--” she paused, half smiling--“a trust till your wedding.”

She had tried to say the word lightly, but it echoed on through the silence like a peal of silver bells.

“Oh, my wedding! But I shall never marry,” said Anne, laughing joyously, and catching her mother in her arms. It was the first time she had made so impulsive a movement; Kate Clephane, trembling a little, held her close.

It brought the girl nearer, made her less aloof, to hear that familiar old denial. “Some day before long,” the mother thought, “she’ll tell me who he is.”

VI.

Kate Clephane lay awake all night thinking of the man who had been too shy to come into the box.

Her sense of security, of permanence, was gone. She understood now that it had been based on the idea that her life would henceforth go on just as it had for the two months since her return; that she and Anne would always remain side by side. The idea was absurd, of course; if she followed it up, her mind recoiled from it. To keep Anne for the rest of her life unchanged, and undesirous of change--the aspiration was inconceivable. She wanted for her daughter the common human round, no more, but certainly no less. Only she did not want her to marry yet--not till they two had grown to know each other better, till Kate had had time to establish herself in her new life.

So she put it to herself; but she knew that what she felt was just an abject fear of change, more change--of being uprooted again, cast once more upon her own resources.

No! She could not picture herself living alone in a little house in New York, dependent on Drovers and Tresseltons, and on the good Fred Landers, for her moral sustenance. To be with Anne, to play the part of Anne’s mother--the one part, she now saw, that fate had meant her for--that was what she wanted with all her starved and world-worn soul. To be the background, the atmosphere, of her daughter’s life; to depend on Anne, to feel that Anne depended on her; it was the one perfect companionship she had ever known, the only close tie unmarred by dissimulation and distrust. The mere restfulness of it had made her contracted soul expand as if it were sinking into a deep warm bath.

Now the sense of restfulness was gone. From the moment when she had seen Anne’s lids drop on that secret vision, the mother had known that her days of quietude were over. Anne’s choice might be perfect; she, Kate Clephane, might live out the rest of her days in peace between Anne and Anne’s husband. But the mere possibility of a husband made everything incalculable again.

The morning brought better counsel. There was Anne herself, in her riding-habit, aglow from an early canter, and bringing in her mother’s breakfast, without a trace of mystery in her clear eyes. There was the day’s pleasant routine, easy and insidious, the planning and adjusting of engagements, notes to be answered, invitations to be sent out; the habitual took Mrs. Clephane into its soothing hold. “After all,” she reflected, “young men don’t run away nowadays from falling in love.” Probably the whole thing had been some cryptic chaff of the youth with the football face; Nollie, indirectly, might enlighten her.

Indirectly; for it was clear to Kate that whatever she learned about her daughter must be learned through observing her, and not through questioning others. The mother could not picture herself as having any rights over the girl, as being, under that roof, anything more than a privileged guest. Anne’s very insistence on treating her as the mistress of the house only emphasized her sense of not being so by right: it was the verbal courtesy of the Spaniard who puts all his possessions at the disposal of a casual visitor.

Not that there was anything in Anne’s manner to suggest this; but that to Kate it seemed inherent in the situation. It was absurd to assume that her mere return to John Clephane’s house could invest her, in any one else’s eyes, and much less in her own, with the authority she had lost in leaving it; she would never have dreamed of behaving as if she thought so. Her task, she knew, was gradually, patiently, to win back, of all she had forfeited, the one thing she really valued: her daughter’s love and confidence. The love, in a measure, was hers already; could the confidence fail to follow?

Meanwhile, at any rate, she could be no more than the fondest of lookers-on, the discreetest of listeners; and for the moment she neither saw nor heard anything to explain that secret tremor of Anne’s eyelids.

At the Joe Tresseltons’, a few nights later, she had hoped for a glimpse, a hint. Nollie had invited mother and daughter (with affectionate insistence on the mother’s presence) to a little evening party at which some one who was not Russian was to sing--for Nollie was original in everything. The Joe Tresseltons had managed to lend a freshly picturesque air to a dull old Tresselton house near Washington Square, of which the stable had become a studio, and other apartments suffered like transformations, without too much loss of character. It was typical of Nollie that she could give an appearance of stability to her modern furnishings, just as her modern manner kept its repose.

The party was easy and amusing, but even Lilla Gates (whom Nollie always included) took her tone from the mistress of the house, and, dressed with a kind of savage soberness, sat there in her heavy lustreless beauty, bored but triumphant. It was evident that, though at Nollie’s she was not in her element, she would not for the world have been left out.

Kate Clephane, while the music immobilized the groups scattered about the great shadowy room, found herself scanning them with a fresh intensity of attention. She no longer thought of herself as an object of curiosity to any of these careless self-engrossed young people; she had learned that a woman of her age, however conspicuous her past, and whatever her present claims to notice, is fated to pass unremarked in a society where youth so undisputedly rules. The discovery had come with a slight shock; then she blessed the anonymity which made observation so much easier.

Only--what was there to observe? Again the sameness of the American Face encompassed her with its innocent uniformity. How many of them it seemed to take to make up a single individuality! Most of them were like the miles and miles between two railway stations. She saw again, with gathering wonder, that one may be young and handsome and healthy and eager, and yet unable, out of such rich elements, to evolve a personality.

Her thoughts wandered back to the shabby faces peopling her former life. She knew every seam of their shabbiness, but now for the first time she seemed to see that they had been worn down by emotions and passions, however selfish, however sordid, and not merely by ice-water and dyspepsia.

“Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia,” she reflected, “they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.”

Landers came up as the thought flashed through her mind, and apparently caught its reflection in her smile.

“You look at me as if you’d never seen me before; is it because my tie’s crooked?” he asked, sitting down beside her.

“No; your tie is absolutely straight. So is everything else about you. That’s the reason I was looking at you in that way. I can’t get used to it!”

He reddened a little, as if unaccustomed to such insistent scrutiny. “Used to what?”

“The universal straightness. You’re all so young and--and so regular! I feel as if I were in a gallery of marble masterpieces.”

“As that can hardly apply to our features, I suppose it’s intended to describe our morals,” he said with a faint grimace.

“I don’t know--I wish I did! What I’m trying to do, of course,” she added abruptly and unguardedly, “is to guess how I should feel about all these young men--if I were Anne.”

She was vexed with herself that the words should have slipped out, and yet not altogether sorry. After all, one could always trust Landers to hold his tongue--and almost always to understand. His smile showed that he understood now.

“Of course you’re trying; we all are. But, as far as I know, Sister Anne hasn’t yet seen any one from her tower.”

A breath of relief expanded the mother’s heart.

“Ah, well, you’d be sure to know--especially as, when she does, it ought to be some one visible a long way off!”

“It ought to be, yes. The more so as she seems to be in no hurry.” He looked away. “But don’t build too much on that,” he added. “I learned long ago, in such matters, to expect only the unexpected.”

Kate Clephane glanced at him quickly; his ingenuous countenance wore an unaccustomed shadow. She remembered that, in old days, John Clephane had always jokingly declared--in a tone proclaiming the matter to be one mentionable only as a joke--that Fred Landers was in love with her; and she said to herself that the lesson her old friend referred to was perhaps the one she had unwittingly given him when she went away with another man.

It was on the tip of her tongue to exclaim: “Oh, but I didn’t know anything then--I wasn’t anybody! My real life, my only life, began years later--” but she checked herself with a start. Why, in the very act of thinking of her daughter, had she suddenly strayed away into thinking of Chris? It was the first time it had happened to her to confront the two images, and she felt as if she had committed a sort of profanation.

She took refuge in another thought that Landers’s last words had suggested--the thought that if she herself had matured late, why so might Anne. The idea was faintly reassuring.

“No; I won’t build on any theory,” she said, answering him. “But one can’t help hoping she’ll wait till some one turns up good enough for what she’s going to be.”

“Oh, these mothers!” he laughed, his face smoothing out into its usual guileless lines.

The music was over. The groups flowed past them toward the little tables in another picturesque room, and Lilla Gates swept by in a cluster of guffawing youths. She seemed to have attracted all the kindred spirits in the room, and her sluggish stare was shot with provocation. Ah, there was another mystery! No one explained Lilla--every one seemed to take her for granted. Not that it really mattered; Kate had seen enough of Anne to feel sure she would never be in danger of falling under Lilla’s influence. The perils in wait for her would wear a subtler form. But, as a matter of curiosity, and a possible light on the new America, Kate would have liked to know why her husband’s niece--surprising offshoot of the prudent Clephanes and stolid Drovers--had been singled out, in this new easy-going society, to be at once reproved and countenanced. Lilla in herself was too uninteresting to stimulate curiosity; but as a symptom she might prove enlightening. Only, here again, Kate had the sense that she, of all the world, was least in a position to ask questions. What if people should turn around and ask them about _her_? Since she had been living under her old roof, and at her daughter’s side, the mere suggestion made her tremble. It was curious--and she herself was aware of it--how quickly, unconsciously almost, she had slipped at last into the very attitude the Clephanes had so long tried to force upon her: the attitude of caution and conservatism.

Her glance, in following Lilla, caught Fred Landers’s, and he smiled again, but with a slight constraint. Instantly she thought: “He’d like to tell me her whole story, but he doesn’t dare, because very likely it began like my own. And it will always go on being like that: whatever I’m afraid to ask they’ll be equally afraid to tell.” Well, that was what people called “starting with a clean slate”, she supposed; would no one ever again scribble anything unguardedly on hers? She felt indescribably alone.

On the way home the mere feeling of Anne’s arm against hers drew her out of her solitariness. After all, she had only to wait. The new life was but a few weeks old; and already Anne’s nearness seemed to fill it. If only she could keep Anne near enough!

“Did you like it, mother? How do we all strike you, I wonder?” the girl asked suddenly.

“As kinder than anything I ever dreamed.”

She thought she felt Anne’s surprised glance in the darkness. “Oh, _that_! But why not? It’s you who must try to be kind to us. I feel as if we must be so hard to tell apart. In Europe there are more contrasts, I suppose. I saw Uncle Fred helping you to sort us out this evening.”

“You mean you caught me staring? I daresay I do. I want so much not to miss anything ... anything that’s a part of your life....” Her voice shook with the avowal.

She was answered by a closer pressure. “You wonderful mother! I don’t believe you ever will.” She was conscious in Anne, mysteriously, of a tension answering her own. “Isn’t it splendid to be two to talk things over?” the girl said joyously.

“_What things?_” Kate Clephane thought; but dared not speak. Her hand on Anne’s, she sat silent, feeling her child’s heart tremble nearer.

VII.

Every one noticed how beautifully it worked; the way, as Fred Landers said, she and Anne had hit it off from their first look at each other on the deck of the steamer.

Enid Drover was almost emotional about it, one evening when she and Kate sat alone in the Clephane drawing-room. It was after one of Anne’s “young” dinners, and the other guests, with Anne herself, had been whirled off to some form of midnight entertainment.

“It’s wonderful, my dear, how you’ve done it. Poor mother didn’t always find Anne easy, you know. But she’s taken a tremendous fancy to you.”

Kate felt herself redden with pride. “I suppose it’s the novelty, partly,” Mrs. Drover continued, with her heavy-stepping simplicity. “Perhaps that’s an advantage, in a way.” But she pulled up, apparently feeling that, in some obscure manner, she might be offending where she sought to please. “Anne admires your looks so much, you know; and your slightness.” A sigh came from her adipose depths. “I do believe it gives one more hold over one’s girls to have kept one’s figure. One can at least go on wearing the kind of clothes they like.”

Kate felt an inward glow of satisfaction. The irony of the situation hardly touched her: the fact that the youth and elasticity she had clung to so desperately should prove one of the chief assets of her new venture. It was beginning to seem natural that everything should lead up to Anne.

“This business of setting up a studio, now; Anne’s so pleased that you approve. She had a struggle with her grandmother about it; but poor mother wouldn’t give in. She was too horrified. She thought paint so messy--and then how could she have got up all those stairs?”

“Ah, well”--it was so easy to be generous!--“that sort of thing did seem horrifying to Mrs. Clephane’s generation. After all, it was not so long before her day that Dr. Johnson said portrait-painting was indelicate in a female.”

Mrs. Drover gave her sister-in-law a puzzled look. Her mind seldom retained more than one word in any sentence, and her answer was based on the reaction that particular word provoked. “_Female_--” she murmured--“is that word being used again? I never thought it very nice to apply it to women, did you? I suppose I’m old-fashioned. Nothing shocks the young people nowadays--not even the Bible.”

Nothing could have given Kate Clephane greater confidence in her own success than this little talk with Enid Drover. She had been feeling her way so patiently, so stealthily almost, among the out-works and defences of her daughter’s character; and here she was actually instated in the citadel.

Anne’s “studio-warming” strengthened the conviction. Mrs. Clephane had not been allowed to see the studio; Anne and Nollie and Joe Tresselton, for a breathless week, had locked themselves in with nails and hammers and pots of paint, sealing their ears against all questioning. Then one afternoon the doors were opened, and Kate, coming out of the winter twilight, found herself in a great half-lit room with a single wide window overlooking the reaches of the Sound all jewelled and netted with lights, the fairy span of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the dark roof-forest of the intervening city. It all seemed strangely significant and mysterious in that disguising dusk--full of shadows, distances, invitations. Kate leaned in the window, surprised at this brush of the wings of poetry.

In the room, Anne had had the good taste to let the sense of space prolong itself. It looked more like a great library waiting for its books than a modern studio; as though the girl had measured the distance between that mighty nocturne and her own timid attempts, and wanted the implements of her art to pass unnoticed.

They were sitting--Mrs. Clephane, the Joe Tresseltons and one or two others--about the tea-cups set out at one end of a long oak table, when the door opened and Lilla Gates appeared, tawny and staring, in white furs and big pendulous earrings. She brought with her a mingled smell of cigarettes and Houbigant, and as she stood there, circling the room with her sulky contemptuous gaze, Kate felt a movement of annoyance.

“Why must one forever go on being sorry for Lilla?” she wondered, wincing a little as Anne’s lips touched her cousin’s mauve cheek.

“It was nice of you to come, Lilla.”

“Well--I chucked something bang-up for you,” said Lilla coolly. It was evidently her pride to be perpetually invited, perpetually swamped in a multiplicity of boring engagements. She looked about her again, and then dropped into an armchair. “Mercy--you _have_ cleared the decks!” she remarked. “Ain’t there going to be any more furniture than this?”

“Oh, the furniture’s all outside--and the pictures too,” Anne said, pointing to the great window.

“What--Brooklyn Bridge? Lord!--Oh, but I see: you’ve kept the place clear for dancing. Good girl, Anne! Can I bring in some of my little boys sometimes? Is that a pianola?” she added, with a pounce toward the grand piano in a shadowy corner. “I like this kindergarten,” she pronounced.

Nollie Tresselton laughed. “If you come, Anne won’t let you dance. You’ll all have to sit for her--for hours and hours.”

“Well, we’ll sit between the dances then. Ain’t I going to have a latch-key, Anne?”

She stood leaning against the piano, sipping the cock-tail some one had handed her, her head thrown back, and the light from a shaded lamp striking up at her columnar throat and the green glitter of her earrings, which suggested to Kate Clephane the poisonous antennæ of some giant insect. Anne stood close to her, slender, erect, her small head clasped in close braids, her hands hanging at her sides, dead-white against the straight dark folds of her dress. There was something distinctly unpleasant to Kate Clephane in the proximity of the two, and she rose and moved toward the piano.

As she sat down before it, letting her hands drift into the opening bars of a half-remembered melody, she saw Lilla, in her vague lounging way, draw nearer to Anne, who held out a hand for the empty cock-tail glass. The gesture brought them so close that Lilla, slightly drooping her head, could let fall, hardly above her breath, but audibly to Kate: “He’s back again. He bothered the life out of me to bring him here today.”

Again Kate saw that quick drop of her daughter’s lids; this time it was accompanied by a just-perceptible tremor of the hand that received the glass.

“Nonsense, Lilla!”

“Well, what on earth am I to do about it? I can’t get the police to run him in, can I?”

Anne laughed--the faintest half-pleased laugh of impatience and dismissal. “You may have to,” she said.

Nollie Tresselton, in the interval, had glided up and slipped an arm through Lilla’s.

“Come along, my dear. There’s to be no dancing here today.” Her little brown face had the worn sharp look it often took on when she was mothering Lilla. But Lilla’s feet were firmly planted. “I don’t budge till I get another cock-tail.”

One of the young men hastened to supply her, and Anne turned to her other guests. A few minutes later the Tresseltons and Lilla went away, and one by one the remaining visitors followed, leaving mother and daughter alone in the recovered serenity of the empty room.

But there was no serenity in Kate. That half-whispered exchange between Lilla Gates and Anne had stirred all her old apprehensions and awakened new ones. The idea that her daughter was one of Lilla’s confidants was inexpressibly disturbing. Yet the more she considered, the less she knew how to convey her anxiety to her daughter.

“If I only knew how intimate they really are--what she really thinks of Lilla!”

For the first time she understood on what unknown foundations her fellowship with Anne was built. Were they solid? Would they hold? Was Anne’s feeling for her more than a sudden girlish enthusiasm for an agreeable older woman, the kind of sympathy based on things one can enumerate, and may change one’s mind about, rather than the blind warmth of habit?

She stood musing while Anne moved about the studio, putting away the music, straightening a picture here and there.

“And this is where you’re going to work--”

Anne nodded joyously.

“Lilla apparently expects you to turn it into a dance-hall for her benefit.”

“Poor Lilla! She can’t see a new room without wanting to fox-trot in it. Life, for her, wherever she is, consists in going somewhere else in order to do exactly the same thing.”

Kate was relieved: there was no mistaking the half-disdainful pity of the tone.

“Well--don’t give her that latch-key!” she laughed, gathering up her furs.

Anne echoed the laugh. “There are to be only two latch-keys--yours and mine,” she said; and mother and daughter went gaily down the steep stairs.

* * * * *

The days, after that, moved on with the undefinable reassurance of habit. Kate Clephane was beginning to feel herself part of an old-established routine. She had tried to organize her life in such a way that it should fit into Anne’s without awkward overlapping. Anne, nowadays, after her early canter, went daily to the studio and painted till lunch; sometimes, as the days lengthened, she went back for another two hours’ work in the afternoon. When the going was too bad for her morning ride she usually walked to the studio, and Kate sometimes walked with her, or went through the Park to meet her on her return. When she painted in the afternoon, Kate would occasionally drop in for tea, and they would return home together on foot in the dusk. But Mrs. Clephane was scrupulously careful not to intrude on her daughter’s working-hours; she held back, not with any tiresome display of discretion, but with the air of caring for her own independence too much not to respect Anne’s.

Sometimes, now that she had settled down into this new way of life, she was secretly aware of feeling a little lonely; there were hours when the sense of being only a visitor in the house where her life ought to have been lived gave her the same drifting uprooted feeling which had been the curse of her other existence. It was not Anne’s fault; nor that, in this new life, every moment was not interesting and even purposeful, since each might give her the chance of serving Anne, pleasing Anne, in some way or another getting closer to Anne. But this very feeling took a morbid intensity from the fact of having no common memories, no shared associations, to feed on. Kate was frightened, sometimes, by its likeness to that other isolated and devouring emotion which her love for Chris had been. Everything might have been different, she thought, if she had had more to do, or more friends of her own to occupy her. But Anne’s establishment, which had been her grandmother’s, still travelled smoothly enough on its own momentum, and though the girl insisted that her mother was now the head of the house, the headship involved little more than ordering dinner, and talking over linen and carpets and curtains with old Mrs. Clephane’s house-keeper.

Then, as to friends--was it because she was too much engrossed in her daughter to make any? Or because her life had been too incommunicably different from that of her bustling middle-aged contemporaries, absorbed by local and domestic questions she had no part in? Or had she been too suddenly changed from a self-centred woman, insatiable for personal excitements, into that new being, a mother, her centre of gravity in a life not hers?

She did not know; she felt only that she no longer had time for anything but motherhood, and must be content to bridge over, as best she could, the unoccupied intervals. And, after all, the intervals were not many. Her daughter never appeared without instantly filling up every crevice of the present, and overflowing into the past and the future, so that, even in the mother’s rare lapses into despondency, life without Anne, like life before Anne, had become unthinkable.

She was revolving this for the thousandth time as she turned into the Park one afternoon to meet Anne on the latter’s way homeward. The days were already much longer; the difference in the light, and that premature languor of the air which comes, in America, before the sleeping earth seems to expect it, made Mrs. Clephane feel that the year had turned, that a new season was opening in her new life. She walked on with the vague sense of confidence in the future which the first touch of spring gives. The worst of the way was past--how easily, how smoothly to the feet! Where misunderstanding and failure had been so probable, she was increasingly sure of having understood and succeeded. And already she and Anne were making delightful plans for the spring....

Ahead of her, in a transverse alley, she was disagreeably surprised by the sight of Lilla Gates. There was no mistaking that tall lounging figure, though it was moving slowly away from her. Lilla at that hour in the Park? It seemed curious and improbable. Yet Lilla it was; and Mrs. Clephane’s conclusion was drawn immediately. “Who is she waiting for?”

Whoever it was had not come; the perspective beyond Lilla was empty. After a moment she hastened her step, and vanished behind a clump of evergreens at the crossing of the paths. Kate did not linger to watch for her reappearance. The incident was too trifling to fix the attention; after all, what had one ever expected of Lilla but that she might be found loitering in unlikely places, in quest of objectionable people? There was nothing new in that--nor did Kate even regret not having a glimpse of the objectionable person. In her growing reassurance about Anne, Lilla’s affairs had lost whatever slight interest they once offered.

She walked on--but her mood was altered. The sight of Lilla lingering in that deserted path had called up old associations. She remembered meetings of the same kind--but was it her own young figure she saw fading down those far-off perspectives? Well--if it were, let it go! She owned no kinship with that unhappy ghost. Serene, middle-aged, respected and respectable, she walked on again out of that vanishing past into the warm tangible present. And at any moment now she might meet Anne.

She had turned down a wide walk leading to one of the Fifth Avenue entrances of the Park. One could see a long way ahead; there were people coming and going. Two women passed, with some noisy children racing before them, a milliner’s boy, whistling, his boxes slung over his shoulder, a paralytic pushing himself along in a wheeled chair; then, coming toward her from the direction of Fifth Avenue, a man who half-stopped, recognized her, and raised his hat.