His answer carried the shock of an evocation. "I merely asked her what
she thought of _you_."
"Of me?"
"She admires you immensely, you know."
For a moment Mrs. Quentin's cheek showed the lingering light of
girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the
transmitter's merit. "Well--?" she smiled.
"Well--you didn't make my father give up the _Radiator_, did you?"
His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: "She never comes
here. How can she know me?"
"She's so poor! She goes out so little." He rose and leaned against the
mantel-piece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze
wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish
ivories. "And then her mother--" he added, as if involuntarily.
"Her mother has never visited me," Mrs. Quentin finished for him.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll. Her
rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother's sampler."
"But the daughter is so modern--and yet--"
"The result is the same? Not exactly. _She_ admires you--oh,
immensely!" He replaced the bronze and turned to his mother with a
smile. "Aren't you on some hospital committee together? What especially
strikes her is your way of doing good. She says philanthropy is not a
line of conduct, but a state of mind--and it appears that you are one
of the elect."
As, in the vague diffusion of physical pain, relief seems to come with
the acuter pang of a single nerve, Mrs. Quentin felt herself suddenly
eased by a rush of anger against the girl. "If she loved you--" she
began.