She was one of those fat, pink people who fade and contract with age like drying fruit; and her outside was a true portrait of her.  Her husband and her daughter had long ago absorbed her.  What intelligence she had was given almost wholly to comprehending and serving those two, and except in the presence of one of them she was nearly always absent-minded.  Edith lived all day with her mother, as daughters do; and Sheridan so held his wife to her unity with him that she had long ago become unconscious of her existence as a thing separate from his.  She invariably perceived his moods, and nursed him through them when she did not share them; and she gave him a profound sympathy with the inmost spirit and purpose of his being, even though she did not comprehend it and partook of it only as a spectator.  They had known but one actual altercation in their lives, and that was thirty years past, in the early days of Sheridan’s struggle, when, in order to enhance the favorable impression he believed himself to be making upon some capitalists, he had thought it necessary to accompany them to a performance of “The Black Crook.”  But she had not once referred to this during the last ten years.

Mrs. Sheridan’s manner was hurried and inconsequent; her clothes rustled more than other women’s clothes; she seemed to wear too many at a time and to be vaguely troubled by them, and she was patting a skirt down over some unruly internal dissension at the moment she opened Bibbs’s door.

At sight of the recumbent figure she began to close the door softly, withdrawing, but the young man had heard the turning of the knob and the rustling of skirts, and he opened his eyes.

“Don’t go, mother,” he said.  “I’m not asleep.”  He swung his long legs over the side of the bed to rise, but she set a hand on his shoulder, restraining him; and he lay flat again.

“No,” she said, bending over to kiss his cheek, “I just come for a minute, but I want to see how you seem.  Edith said—­”

“Poor Edith!” he murmured.  “She couldn’t look at me.  She—­”

“Nonsense!” Mrs. Sheridan, having let in the light at a window, came back to the bedside.  “You look a great deal better than what you did before you went to the sanitarium, anyway.  It’s done you good; a body can see that right away.  You need fatting up, of course, and you haven’t got much color—­”

“No,” he said, “I haven’t much color.”

“But you will have when you get your strength back.”

“Oh yes!” he responded, cheerfully.  “Then I will.”

“You look a great deal better than what I expected.”

“Edith must have a great vocabulary!” he chuckled.

“She’s too sensitive,” said Mrs. Sheridan, “and it makes her exaggerate a little.  What about your diet?”

“That’s all right.  They told me to eat anything.”

“Anything at all?”

“Well—­anything I could.”