“I shall never write again,” she answered, quietly, without regret.  It was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to the subtler perceptions of her feeling.  She would never write again—­her art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in experience as a human soul.

“I was too young, that was the trouble,” pursued Trent, “there were five years between us.”

“My dear boy,” she laughed merrily, “there was all eternity.”

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him while he watched her.  A new beauty had passed into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was in her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she appeared to him not as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of which he had dreamed—­of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets wrote.  Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions, his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of his approaching baldness.  Was love, after all, he questioned, only a re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists believed?  Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which matter lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over in his thoughts, and at the luncheon table, a little later, he met his mother’s placid enquiries with an explosion of boyish despair.

“There’s no use trying to persuade me—­I can’t eat,” he said.

“But, my dear son, I fear you’ll work yourself into an illness,” returned Mrs. Trent, with her unshaken calm.

“I don’t care,” replied the young man desperately, “whether I die now or later, it is all the same.”

“I suppose really it is,” admitted his mother; but she added after a pause in which she had dipped mildly into a philosophic curiosity, “The way being in love effects one has always seemed to me the very strangest thing in life.  I remember your uncle Channing lived exclusively on onions for a whole month after Mattie Godwin refused his offer.  Why he selected onions I could never explain,” she concluded, “unless it was that he had never been able to endure the taste of them, and he seemed bent upon making himself as miserable as it was possible to be.”

While she went on placidly eating her hashed chicken, Trent tossed off a glass or two of claret, which he was perfectly aware, taken on his empty stomach, would immediately produce a racking headache.  Since his passion was not sincere, it occurred to him that it might at least become dramatic; but he saw presently, with aggrieved surprise, that the impression made upon his mother by his violent behavior was far slighter than he had brought himself to expect.  When next she spoke her thoughts appeared to have strayed utterly from the subject of his appetite.