The lowered awnings of her inner drawing-room cast a luminous shadow on old cabinets and consoles, and on the pale flowers scattered here and there in vases of bronze and porcelain.  Clare’s taste was as capricious as her moods, and the rest of the house was not in harmony with this room.  There was, in particular, another drawing-room, which she now described as Peter’s creation, but which Ralph knew to be partly hers:  a heavily decorated apartment, where Popple’s portrait of her throned over a waste of gilt furniture.  It was characteristic that to-day she had had Ralph shown in by another way; and that, as she had spared him the polyphonic drawing-room, so she had skilfully adapted her own appearance to her soberer background.  She sat near the window, reading, in a clear cool dress:  and at his entrance she merely slipped a finger between the pages and looked up at him.

Her way of receiving him made him feel that restlessness and stridency were as unlike her genuine self as the gilded drawing-room, and that this quiet creature was the only real Clare, the Clare who had once been so nearly his, and who seemed to want him to know that she had never wholly been any one else’s.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were still in town?” he asked, as he sat down in the sofa-corner near her chair.

Her dark smile deepened.  “I hoped you’d come and see.”

“One never knows, with you.”

He was looking about the room with a kind of confused pleasure in its pale shadows and spots of dark rich colour.  The old lacquer screen behind Clare’s head looked like a lustreless black pool with gold leaves floating on it; and another piece, a little table at her elbow, had the brown bloom and the pear-like curves of an old violin.

“I like to be here,” Ralph said.

She did not make the mistake of asking:  “Then why do you never come?” Instead, she turned away and drew an inner curtain across the window to shut out the sunlight which was beginning to slant in under the awning.

The mere fact of her not answering, and the final touch of well-being which her gesture gave, reminded him of other summer days they had spent together long rambling boy-and-girl days in the hot woods and fields, when they had never thought of talking to each other unless there was something they particularly wanted to say.  His tired fancy strayed off for a second to the thought of what it would have been like come back, at the end of the day, to such a sweet community of silence; but his mind was too crowded with importunate facts for any lasting view of visionary distances.  The thought faded, and he merely felt how restful it was to have her near...

“I’m glad you stayed in town:  you must let me come again,” he said.

“I suppose you can’t always get away,” she answered; and she began to listen, with grave intelligent eyes, to his description of his tedious days.

With her eyes on him he felt the exquisite relief of talking about himself as he had not dared to talk to any one since his marriage.  He would not for the world have confessed his discouragement, his consciousness of incapacity; to Undine and in Washington Square any hint of failure would have been taken as a criticism of what his wife demanded of him.  Only to Clare Van Degen could he cry out his present despondency and his loathing of the interminable task ahead.