Since coming to New York Mrs. Trent had taken a small apartment in a big apartment house, where she lived with her son a perfectly provincial as well as a strictly secluded life. She was a large, florid, motherly old lady who still wore mourning for a husband who had been killed while fox hunting twenty-five years ago. Her face resembled a friendly and auspicious full moon, and above it her shining hair rolled like a parting of silvery clouds. Day or night she was always engaged in knitting a purple shawl, which appeared never to have been finished since her son's infancy, for his earliest recollection was of the plump, soft balls of brilliant yarn and the long ivory knitting needles which clicked briskly while she worked with a pleasant, familiar sound. To this day the clicking of those needles brought to his mouth the taste of large slices of bread and jam, and to his ears the soothing murmur of Bible stories told in the twilight.
She was always, too, serene gossip that she was, full of a monotonous, rippling stream of words, and if her days in New York were trying to her body and burdened with homesickness for her heart, no one—not even St. George himself—had ever surprised so much as a passing shadow upon her face. The young man's untiring pursuit of managers and of players had left her continually alone, but she busied herself cheerfully about her housekeeping, and found diversion in yielding to an inordinate curiosity concerning her neighbours. Once or twice she had questioned him about his absence, and this was especially so the morning after his meeting with Laura Wilde.
"You didn't tell me where you were yesterday, St. George," she observed at breakfast; "did you meet any one who is likely to be of use? I remember Beverly Pierce told me that everything had to come through introductions in the North."
He looked at her steadily a moment before replying, taking in all the lovely details of her appearance behind the coffee tray—the morning sunlight on her white hair and on the massive, hand-beaten, old silver service, the solitary rose he had purchased in the street standing between them in a slender Bohemian vase, brought from the rare old china in the press just at her back, the dainty hemstitching on her collar and cuffs of fine thread cambric, and lastly the vivid spot of color made by the knitting she had laid aside.
"I met Laura Wilde," he answered presently, "but as you never read poetry you can't understand just what it means."
As she held the cream jug poised above his coffee cup Mrs. Trent smiled back at him with a placid wonder.
"Who is she, my son? A lady—I mean a real one?"
"Oh, yes, sterling."
"But she writes verse you say! Is it improper?"
His eyes shone with amusement. "Improper! Why, what an idea!"
"I'm sure I don't know how it is," responded his mother, carefully measuring with her eye the correct allowance of cream, "but somehow women always seem to get immodest when they take to verse. It's as if they went into it for the express purpose of airing their improprieties."
"I say!" he exclaimed, with gentle mockery, "have you been reading 'Sappho' at your age?"
She continued to regard him blandly, without so much as a flicker of humour in her serene blue eyes. "Your grandfather used to be very fond of quoting something from 'Sappho,'" she returned thoughtfully, "or was it from Mr. Pope? I can't remember which or what it was except that it was hardly the kind of thing you would recite to a lady."
Trent laughed good-humouredly as he received his coffee cup.
"Well you can't point a moral with Miss Wilde," he rejoined, "you'd be at liberty to recite her to anybody who had the sense to understand her."
"Is she very deep?"
"She's profound—she's wonderful—she's a genius."
Mrs. Trent shook her head a little doubtfully. "I don't see that a woman has any business to be a genius," she remarked. "And I can't help being prejudiced against women writers, your father always was. It's as if they really pretended to know as much as a man. When they publish books I suppose they expect men to read them and that in itself is a kind of conceit."
Trent yielded the point as he helped himself to the cakes brought in by an old negro servant.
"Well, I shan't ask Miss Wilde to call on you," he laughed, "so you won't be apt to run across the learned of your sex."
"Oh, I shouldn't mind myself," responded the old lady, with amiability, "but I do hate to have you thrown with women that you wouldn't meet at home."
"I certainly shouldn't meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you mean."
"It's bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this," resumed Mrs. Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, "and to dry your clothes on your neighbour's roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not forced to associate with common people. Of course I don't expect to find the manners of Virginia up here," she added as a last concession, "but I may as well confess that the people I've come across don't seem to me to be exactly civil."
"Just as we don't seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare say."
She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son's mind like little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.
"I'm almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and flowers in their bonnets," she pursued, "to say nothing of low-neck dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary politeness. I met the doctor coming out of the apartment downstairs, so in common decency I went immediately to enquire who was sick, and carried along a glass of chicken jelly. The woman who opened the door was rather rude," she finished with a sigh. "I don't believe such a thing had ever happened to her before in the whole course of her life."
Trent gave her a tender glance across the coffee service.
"Probably not," he admitted, "but I wouldn't waste my jelly if I were you."
"I sha'n't" she determined sadly, "and that's the thing I miss most of all—visiting the sick."
"You might devote yourself to the hospitals—there are plenty of them it seems."
Her resignation, however, was complete, and she showed no impulse to reach out actively again. "It wouldn't be the same, my dear—I don't want strange paupers but real friends. Do you know," she added, with a despair that was almost abject, "I was counting up this morning the people I might speak to if I met them in the street, and I got them in easily on the fingers of one hand. That included," she confessed after a hesitation, "the doctor, the butcher's boy and the woman who comes to scrub. It would surprise you to find what a very interesting woman she is."
Trent rose from his chair and, coming round to where she sat, gave her a boyish hug of sympathy. "You're a regular angel of a mother," he said and added playfully, while he still held her, "even then I don't see how you make it five."
She put up her large white hand and smoothed his hair across his forehead. "That's only because I made an acquaintance in the elevator yesterday," she replied.
"In the elevator! How?"
"The thing always makes me nervous, you know—I can't abide it, and I'd much rather any day go up and down the seven flights—but she met me as I started to walk and persuaded me to come inside. Then she held my hand until I got quite to the bottom."
"Indeed," said Trent suspiciously; "who was she?"
"Her name is Christina Coles, and she came from Clarke County. I knew her grandfather."
"Thank Heaven!" breathed Trent, and his voice betrayed his happy reassurance.
"She's really very pretty—all the Coles were handsome—her great-aunt was once a famous beauty. Do you remember my speaking of her—Miss Betty Coles?" He shook his head, and she proceeded with her reminiscence.
"Well, she was said to have received fifty