His gesture checked her.  “I’m not asking you to get her to do that.”

The two were again silent, facing each other in the disarray of a common catastrophe—­as though their thoughts, at the summons of danger, had rushed naked into action.  Mrs. Quentin, at this revealing moment, saw for the first time how many elements of her son’s character had seemed comprehensible simply because they were familiar:  as, in reading a foreign language, we take the meaning of certain words for granted till the context corrects us.  Often as in a given case, her maternal musings had figured his conduct, she now found herself at a loss to forecast it; and with this failure of intuition came a sense of the subserviency which had hitherto made her counsels but the anticipation of his wish.  Her despair escaped in the moan, “What is it you ask me?”

“To talk to her.”

“Talk to her?”

“Show her—­tell her—­make her understand that the paper has always been a thing outside your life—­that hasn’t touched you—­that needn’t touch her.  Only, let her hear you—­watch you—­be with you—­she’ll see...she can’t help seeing...”

His mother faltered.  “But if she’s given you her reasons—?”

“Let her give them to you!  If she can—­when she sees you....”  His impatient hand again displaced the wrestler.  “I care abominably,” he confessed.

II

On the Fenno threshold a sudden sense of the futility of the attempt had almost driven Mrs. Quentin back to her carriage; but the door was already opening, and a parlor-maid who believed that Miss Fenno was in led the way to the depressing drawing-room.  It was the kind of room in which no member of the family is likely to be found except after dinner or after death.  The chairs and tables looked like poor relations who had repaid their keep by a long career of grudging usefulness:  they seemed banded together against intruders in a sullen conspiracy of discomfort.  Mrs. Quentin, keenly susceptible to such influences, read failure in every angle of the upholstery.  She was incapable of the vulgar error of thinking that Hope Fenno might be induced to marry Alan for his money; but between this assumption and the inference that the girl’s imagination might be touched by the finer possibilities of wealth, good taste admitted a distinction.  The Fenno furniture, however, presented to such reasoning the obtuseness of its black-walnut chamferings; and something in its attitude suggested that its owners would be as uncompromising.  The room showed none of the modern attempts at palliation, no apologetic draping of facts; and Mrs. Quentin, provisionally perched on a green-reps Gothic sofa with which it was clearly impossible to establish any closer relations, concluded that, had Mrs. Fenno needed another seat of the same size, she would have set out placidly to match the one on which her visitor now languished.