Mrs. Joyce's house was a stone structure of rather characterless design
which stood at the intersection of a wide boulevard and one of the
narrower crosstown streets, but it seemed very palatial to Victor as he
wonderingly entered its looming granite portal. His mother tripped up
the stairs with the air of one who feels very much at home.
A man in snuff-colored livery took his hat and coat and ushered him into
a large reception-room on the left, and there his hostess found him some
ten minutes later. "Come and meet my brother from California," she said,
and led the way across the hall into the library, where a tall man with
gray hair and mustache was talking with a dark, alert and smoothly
shaven man of middle age. The one Mrs. Joyce introduced as her brother,
Mr. Wood, and the other as Mr. Carew.
Victor was relieved to have Miss Wood enter and greet him cordially, for
the men did not seem to value him sufficiently to include him in their
conversation. Mr. Wood was reserved and the tone of Carew's voice was
cynical.
Leonora Wood was of that severe type of beauty which requires stately
gowns, and Victor confessed that she was quite the finest figure of a
girl he had ever met, but when Mrs. Joyce said, "You are to take Leo out
to dinner" he merely bowed, resenting her amused smile.
His seat at table brought him next a very old lady--Mrs. Wood,
senior--who beamed upon him with cheerful interest. There were several
other women of that vague middle age which does not interest youth.
Miss Wood talked extremely well, and he became interested in spite of
himself.
"I wonder how much longer we're going to believe in 'luck' and
'coincidence,'" she said, after some remark of his. "Maybe it's all
thought transference or telepathy or something."
"Don't tell me you really believe in such things. Professor Boyden says
they are all a part of the spineless mysticism which is sweeping over
the country."
She assumed a patronizing air. "It's natural for undergraduates to quote
their teachers. I wonder how long it will be before you will consider
them all old fogies."
He rose to the defense of his hero. "Boyden will never be an old fogy.
He's the most up-to-date man in America. He really is the only
experimentalist along these lines. He's out for the facts."
"Your mother's Voices say he is as blind as the rest, wilfully blind."
"Do you really hold stock in my mother's Voices?"