A complete silence followed this little speech—­a silence that went on and on and seemed to be stronger than human power.  Perhaps for the first time in his life Lanley felt hostile toward the girl beside him.  “Oh, dear,” Mathilde was thinking, “I suppose I’ve made him remember my grandmother and his youth!” “Can love be remembered,” Pete was saying to himself, “or is it like a perfume that can be recognized, but not recalled?”

Lanley turned at last to Wayne.

“It’s out of the question,” he said, “that you should take this child to China at two weeks’ notice.  You must see that.”

“I see perfectly that many people will think it so.  But you must see that to us it is the inevitable thing to do.”

“If every one else agreed, I should oppose it.”

“O Grandfather!” wailed Mathilde.  “And you were our great hope—­you and Mrs. Wayne!”

“In a matter like this I shall stand by your mother, Mathilde,” he said, and Mathilde imagined he meant as opposed to herself.  But he was making an even greater renunciation.

Adelaide was surprised and not pleased when Mathilde came home late for lunch, bringing the Wayne boy with her.  It was not that she had expected her one little phrase about Wayne’s hands to change her daughter’s love into repugnance,—­that sentence had been only the first drop in a distillation that would do its poisonous work gradually,—­but she had supposed that Mathilde would be too sensitive to expose Pete to further criticism.  Indeed, there seemed something obtuse, if not actually indelicate, in being willing to create a situation in which every one was bound to suffer.  Obtuseness was not a defect with which Adelaide had much patience.

Mathilde saw at once that her mother was going to be what in the family slang was called “grand.”  The grandeur consisted in a polite inattention; it went with a soft voice and immobile expression.  In this mood Adelaide answered you about three seconds later than you expected, and though she answered you accurately, it was as if she had forced her mind back from a more congenial ether.  She seemed to be wrapped in an agreeable cloud until you gave her some opening, and then she came out of her cloud like a flash of lightning.

Wayne, who had lived his life so far with a woman who did not believe in the use of force in human relations, viewed these symptoms of coercion with the utmost indifference; but Mathilde had not so far freed herself as to ignore them.  She was not afraid, but easy conversation under the menace was beyond her.  She couldn’t think of anything to say.

Adelaide was accustomed by these methods to drive the inexperienced—­and she considered Pete pitifully inexperienced in social fine points—­into a state of conversational unrest in which they would finally ask recklessly, “Have you been to the theater lately?” and she would question gently, “The theater?” as much as to say, “I’ve heard that word somewhere before,” until the conscientious conversationalist, rushing from futility to futility, would be finally engulfed in some yawning banality and sink out of sight forever.