In all her life Mathilde had never felt so conspicuous as she did going up the long flight of stairs at the Fifth Avenue entrance of the museum. It seemed to her that people, those walking past in the sunshine on the sidewalk, and the strangers in town seeing the sights from the top of the green busses, were saying to one another as they looked at her, "There goes a New York girl to meet her lover in one of the more ancient of the Egyptian rooms."

She started as she heard the voice of the guard, though he was saying nothing but "Check your umbrella" to a man behind her. She sped across the marble floor of the great tapestry hall as a little, furry wild animal darts across an open space in the woods. She was thinking that she could not bear it if Pete were not there. How could she wait many minutes under the eyes of the guards, who must know better than any one else that no flesh-and-blood girl took any real interest in Egyptian antiquities? The round, unambitious dial at the entrance, like an enlarged kitchen-clock, had pointed to the exact hour set for the meeting. She ought not to expect that Pete, getting away from the office in business hours, could be as punctual as an eager, idle creature like herself.

She had made up her mind so clearly that when she entered the night-blue room there would be nothing but tombs and mummies that when she saw Pete standing with his overcoat over his arm, in the blue-serge clothes she particularly liked, she felt as much surprised as if their meeting were accidental.

She tried to draw a long breath.

"I shall never get used to it," she said. "If we had been married a thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you."

"Oh, no, you won't," he answered. "I hope the very next time we meet you will say, quite in a wife's orthodox tone: 'My dear, I've been waiting twenty minutes. Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have misunderstood you.'"

"You hope? Oh, I hope we shall never be like that."

"Really? Why, I enjoy the idea. I shall enjoy saying to total strangers, 'Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time—' It makes me feel so indissolubly united to you."

"I like it best as we are now."

"We might try different methods alternate years: one year we could be domestic, and the next, detached, and so on."

By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case, and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation. "Poor thing!" she said. "I suppose she once had a lover, too."

"And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple Museum," said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added: "But come along. I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to furnish our home. I think you'll like them."

Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in without the slightest warning. One of them was about a fancy ball he was giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station. But this new idea, to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked. She believed that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was childish. To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.

It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings: there was a piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug, swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent receptacle for chocolates at her bedside. "The Boy with the Sword" for the dining-room, Ver Meer's "Women at the Window," the small Bonnington, and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was effected by the selection of Constable's landscape of a bridge. Wayne kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings, astonished at his own moderation. They had hardly begun, indeed, before Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes even the robust in museums.

Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.

"How beautifully you know your way about here!" she said. "I suppose you've brought lots of girls here before me."

"A glorious army," said Pete, "the matron and the maid. You ought to see my mother in a museum. She's lost before she gets well inside the turnstile."

But Mathilde was thinking.

"How strange it is," she observed, "that I never should have thought before about your caring for any one else. Pete, did you ever ask any one else to marry you?"

Wayne nodded.

"Yes; when I was in college. I asked a girl to marry me. She was having rather a rotten time."

"Were you in love with her?"

He shook his head, and in the silence shuffling and staccato footsteps were heard, announcing the approach of a youthful art class and their teacher. "Jade," said the voice of the lady, "one of the hardest of known substances, has yet been beautifully worked from time immemorial—"

More pairs of eyes in that art class were fixed on the obviously guilty couple in the corner than on the beautiful cloudy objects in the cases, and it was not until they had all followed their guide to the armor-room, and had grouped themselves about the casque of Joan of Arc, that Wayne went on as if no interruption had occurred:

"If you want to know whether I have ever experienced anything like my feeling for you since the first moment I saw you, I never have and never shall, and thereto I plight thee my troth."

Mathilde turned her full face toward him, shedding gratitude and affection as a lamp sheds light before she answered:

"You were terribly unkind to me yesterday."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I shall never forget the way you kissed me, as if I were a rather repulsive piece of wood."

Pete craned his neck, and met the suspicious eye of a guard.

"I don't think anything can be done about it at the moment," he said; and added in explanation, "You see, I felt as if you had suddenly deserted me."

"Pete, I couldn't ever desert you—unless I committed suicide."

Presently he stood up, declaring that this was not the fitting place for arranging the details of their marriage.

"Come to one of the smaller picture galleries," he said, "and as we go
I'll show you a portrait of my mother."

"Your mother? I did not know she had had a portrait done. By whom?"

"A fellow called Bellini. He thought he was doing the Madonna."

When they reached the picture, a figure was already before it. Mr. Lanley was sitting, with his arms folded and his feet stretched out far before him, his head bent, but his eyes raised and fixed on the picture. They saw him first, and had two or three seconds to take in the profound contemplation of his mood. Then he slowly raised his eyes and encountered theirs.

There is surely nothing compromising in an elderly gentleman spending a contemplative morning alone at the Metropolitan Museum. It might well be his daily custom; but the knowledge that it was not, the consciousness of the rarity of the mood that had brought him there, oppressed Mr. Lanley almost like a crime. He felt caught, outraged, ashamed as he saw them. "That's the age which has a right to it," he said to himself. And then as if in a mirror he saw an expression of embarrassment on their faces, and was reminded that their meeting must have been illicit, too. He stood up and looked at them sternly.

"Up-town at this hour, Wayne?" he said.

"Grandfather, I never knew you came here much," said Mathilde.

"It's near me, you know," he answered weakly, so weakly that he felt impelled to give an explanation. "Sometimes, my dear," he said, "you will find that even the most welcome guest rather fills the house."

"You need not worry about yours," returned Mathilde. "I left her with Mama."

Mr. Lanley felt that his brief moment of peace was indeed over. He could imagine the impressions that Mrs. Baxter was perhaps at that very moment sharing with Adelaide. He longed to question his granddaughter, but did not know how to put it.

"How was your mother looking?" he finally decided upon.

"Dreary," answered Mathilde, with a laugh.

"Does this picture remind you of any one?" asked Wayne, suddenly.

Mr. Lanley looked at him as if he hadn't heard, and frowned.

"I don't know what you mean," he said.

"Don't you think there's a look of my mother about it?"

"No," said Mr. Lanley, rather loudly, and then added, "Well, I see what you mean, though I shouldn't—" He stopped and turning to them with some sternness, he asked them how they accounted for their presence in the museum at such an hour and alone.

There was nothing to do but to tell him the truth. And when Wayne had finished, Mathilde was surprised at her grandfather's question. She thought he would ask what her mother thought of it. If they had been alone, she would have told him that Adelaide thought Wayne a commonplace young man with stubby hands; but as it was, she had resolved to put her mother's opposition on a more dignified plane. Only Mr. Lanley did not ask the question of her. It was to Wayne he was speaking, when he said:

"What does your mother think of it?"

"Oh, my mother," answered Pete. "Well, she thinks that if she were a girl she'd like to go to China."

Mr. Lanley looked up, and they both smiled with the most perfect understanding.

"She would," said the older man, and then he became intensely serious.
"It's quite out of the question," he said.

"O Grandfather," Mathilde exclaimed, clasping her hands about his arm, "don't talk like that! It wouldn't be possible for me to let him go without me. O Grandfather, can't you remember what it was like to be in love?"

A complete silence followed this little speech—a silence that went on and on and seemed to be stronger than human power. Perhaps for the first time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him. "Oh, dear," Mathilde was thinking, "I suppose I've made him remember my grandmother and his youth!" "Can love be remembered," Pete was saying to himself, "or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not recalled?"

Lanley turned at last to Wayne.

"It's out of the question," he said, "that you should take this child to
China at two weeks' notice. You must see that."

"I see perfectly that many people will think it so. But you must see that to us it is the inevitable thing to do."

"If every one else agreed, I should oppose it."

"O Grandfather!" wailed Mathilde. "And you were our great hope—you and
Mrs. Wayne!"

"In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde," he said, and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself. But he was making an even greater renunciation.

Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her. It was not that she had expected her one little phrase about Wayne's hands to change her daughter's love into repugnance,—that sentence had been only the first drop in a distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,—but she had supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further criticism. Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one was bound to suffer. Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had much patience.

Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family slang was called "grand." The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention; it went with a soft voice and immobile expression. In this mood Adelaide answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a more congenial ether. She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like a flash of lightning.

Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself as to ignore them. She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the menace was beyond her. She couldn't think of anything to say.

Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced—and she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points—into a state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask recklessly, "Have you been to the theater lately?" and she would question gently, "The theater?" as much as to say, "I've heard that word somewhere before," until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning banality and sink out of sight forever.

But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it. He had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.

"Near where we met my grandfather?" Mathilde asked.

By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum, and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an aristocrat. Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of beauty—artificial beauty, that is—as a class distinction. It seemed to her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for porcelains and pictures. As she held herself aloof from the conversation she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child. But all such considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr. Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her unimpeded departure just before luncheon.

"Your grandfather?" she said, coming out of the clouds. "Was he in the
Metropolitan?"

"Yes," said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed. "Wasn't it queer? Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs. Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn't such a round face, and there in front of it was grandpapa."

Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over. She felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this—the idea of her father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna. Phrases came into her head: silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself; the Wayne family must be suppressed.

Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde:

"My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time. Will you go instead? I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne."

Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty. With men she did not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense; she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a special weakness for mothers. But it would have been better if he had respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that he believed they ought to play fair.

Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.

"Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her to China with you. We could not consent to that, you know."

"I'm sorry," said Pete. The tone was pleasant. That was the trouble; it was too pleasant a tone for a man relinquishing a cherished hope. It sounded almost as if he regretted the inevitable disappointment of the family.

Adelaide tried a new attack.

"Your mother—have you consulted her?"

"Yes, I've told her our plans."

"And she approves?"

Wayne might choose to betray his mother in the full irresponsibility of her attitude to so sympathetic a listener as Mr. Lanley, but he had no intention of giving Mrs. Farron such a weapon. At the same time he did not intend to be untruthful. His answer was this:

"My mother," he said, "is not like most women of her age. She believes in love."

"In all love, quite indiscriminately?"

He hesitated an instant.

"I put it wrong," he answered. "I meant that she believes in the importance of real love."

"And has she a spell by which she tells real love?"

"She believes mine to be real."

"Oh, yours! Very likely. Perhaps it's maternal vanity on my part, Mr. Wayne, but I must own I can imagine a man's contriving to love my daughter, so gentle, so intelligent, and so extraordinarily lovely to look at. I was not thinking of your feelings, but of hers."

"You can see no reason why she should love me?"

Adelaide moved her shoulders about.

"Well, I want it explained, that's all, from your own point of view. I see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don't misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money of her own some day. I don't want a millionaire. I want a person."

"Of course, if you ask me why Mathilde should love me—"

"Don't be untruthful, Mr. Wayne. I thought better of you. If you should come back from China next year to find her engaged to some one else, you could tell a great many reasons why he was not good enough for her. Now tell me some of the reasons why you are. And please don't include because you love her so much, for almost any one would do that."

Pete fought down his panic, reminding himself that no man living could hear such words without terror. His egotism, never colossal, stood feebly between him and Mrs. Farron's estimate of him. He seemed to sink back into the general human species. If he had felt inclined to detail his own qualities, he could not have thought of one. There was a long silence, while Adelaide sat with a look of docile teachableness upon her expectant face.

At last Wayne stood up.

"It's no use, Mrs. Farron," he said "That question of yours can't be answered. I believe she loves me. It's my bet against yours."

"I won't gamble with my child's future," she returned. "I did with my own. Sit down again, Mr. Wayne. You have heard, I suppose, that I have been married twice?"

"Yes." He sat down again reluctantly.

"I was Mathilde's age—a little older. I was more in love than she. And if he had been asked the question I just asked you, he could have answered it. He could have said: 'I have been a leader in a group in which I was, an athlete, an oarsman, and the most superb physical specimen of my race'—brought up, too, he might have added, in the same traditions that I had had. Well, that wasn't enough, Mr. Wayne, and that was a good deal. If my father had only made me wait, only given me time to see that my choice was the choice of ignorance, that the man I thought a hero was, oh, the most pitifully commonplace clay—Mathilde shan't make my mistake."

Wayne's eyes lit up.

"But that's it," he said. "She wouldn't make your mistake. She'd choose right. That's what I ought to have said. You spoke of Mathilde's spirit. She has a feeling for the right thing. Some people have, and some people are bound to choose wrong."

Adelaide laid her hand on her breast.

"You mean me?" she asked, too much interested to be angry.

He was too absorbed in his own interests to give his full attention to hers.

"Yes," he answered. "I mean your principles of choice weren't right ones—leaders of men, you know, and all that. It never works out. Leaders of men are the ones who always cry on their wives' shoulders, and the martinets at home are imposed on by every one else." He gave out this dictum in passing: "But don't trouble about your responsibility in this, Mrs. Farron. It's out of your hands. It's our chance, and Mathilde and I mean to take it. I don't want to give you a warning, exactly, but—it's going to go through."

She looked at him with large, terrified eyes. She was repeating, 'they cry on their wives' shoulders,' or, he might have said, 'on the shoulders of their trained nurses.' She knew that he was talking to her, saying something. She couldn't listen to it. And then he was gone. She was glad he was.

She sat quite still, with her hands lying idly, softly in her lap. It was possible that what he said was true. Perhaps all these people who made such a show of strength to the world were those who sucked double strength by sapping the vitality of a life's companion. It had been true of Joe Severance. She had heard him praised for the courage with which he went forth against temptation, but she had known that it was her strength he was using. She looked up, to see her daughter, pale and eager, standing before her.

"O Mama, was it very terrible?"

"What, dear?"

"Did Pete tell you of our plan?"

Adelaide wished she could have listened to those last sentences of his; but they were gone completely.

She put up her hand and patted the unutterably soft cheek before her.

"He told me something about putting through your absurd idea of an immediate marriage," she said.

"We don't want to do it in a sneaky way, Mama."

"I know. You want to have your own way and to have every one approve of you, too. Is that it?"

Mathilde's lips trembled.

"O Mama," she cried, "you are so different from what you used to be!"

Adelaide nodded.

"One changes," she said. "One's life changes." She had meant this sentence to end the interview, but when she saw the girl still standing before her, she said to herself that it made little difference that she hadn't heard the plans of the Wayne boy, since Mathilde, her own tractable daughter, was still within her power. She moved into the corner of the sofa. "Sit down, dear," she said, and when Mathilde had obeyed with an almost imperceptible shrinking in her attitude, Adelaide went on, with a sort of serious ease of manner:

"I've never been a particularly flattering mother, have I? Never thought you were perfect just because you were mine? Well, I hope you'll pay the more attention to what I have to say. You are remarkable. You are going to be one of the most attractive women that ever was. Years ago old Count Bartiani—do you remember him, at Lucerne?"

"The one who used scent and used to look so long at me?"

"Yes, he was old and rather horrid, but he knew what he was talking about. He said then you would be the most attractive woman in Europe. I heard the same thing from all my friends, and it's true. You have something rare and perfect—-"

These were great words. Mathilde, accustomed all her life to receive information from her mother, received this; and for the first time felt the egotism of her beauty awake, a sense of her own importance the more vivid because she had always been humble-minded. She did not look at her mother; she sat up very straight and stared as if at new fields before her, while a faint smile flickered at the corners of her mouth—a smile of an awakening sense of power.

"What you have," Adelaide went on, "ought to bring great happiness, great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you off from the wonderful, full life that you were entitled to." And then, as if she could not hope to better this, Adelaide sprang up, and left the girl alone.

Mathilde rose, too, and looked at herself in the glass. She was stirred, she was changed, she was awakened, but awakened to something her mother had not counted on. Almost too gentle, too humble, too reasonable, as she had always been, the drop of egotism which her mother had succeeded in instilling into her nature served to solidify her will, to inspire her with a needed power of aggression.

She nodded once at her image in the mirror.

"Well," she said, "it's my life, and I'm willing to take the consequences."