But Wayne resisted this temptation, or, rather, he did not feel it.  He had the courage to be unafraid of silences, and he ate his luncheon and thought about the pictures he had been seeing, and at last began to talk to Mathilde about them, while Adelaide made it clear that she was not listening, until she caught a phrase that drove her grandeur away.

“Near where we met my grandfather?” Mathilde asked.

By this time Adelaide had gathered that the two had been in the museum, and the knowledge annoyed her not only as a mother, but as an aristocrat.  Without being clear about it, she regarded the love of beauty—­artificial beauty, that is—­as a class distinction.  It seemed to her possible enough that the masses should love mountains and moonlight and the sea and sunsets; but it struck her as unfitting that any one but the people she knew, and only a few of them, should really care for porcelains and pictures.  As she held herself aloof from the conversation she was annoyed at noticing that Wayne was showing a more discriminating taste than her own carefully nurtured child.  But all such considerations were driven away by the mention of her father, for Mr. Lanley had been in her mind ever since Mrs. Baxter had taken her unimpeded departure just before luncheon.

“Your grandfather?” she said, coming out of the clouds.  “Was he in the Metropolitan?”

“Yes,” said Mathilde, thankful to be directly addressed.  “Wasn’t it queer?  Pete was taking me to see a picture that looks exactly like Mrs. Wayne, only Mrs. Wayne hasn’t such a round face, and there in front of it was grandpapa.”

Adelaide rose very slowly from table, lunch being fortunately over.  She felt as if she could have borne almost anything but this—­the idea of her father vaporing before a picture of the Madonna.  Phrases came into her head:  silly old man, the time has come to protect him against himself; the Wayne family must be suppressed.

Her silence in the drawing-room was of a more concentrated sort, and when she had taken her coffee and cigarette she said to Mathilde: 

“My dear, I promised to go back to Vincent at this time.  Will you go instead?  I want to have a word with Mr. Wayne.”

Adelaide had never entered any contest in her life, whether it was a dispute with a dressmaker or a quarrel with her husband, without remembering the comfortable fact that she was a beauty.  With men she did not neglect the advantage that being a woman gave her, and with the particular man now before her she had, she knew, a third line of defense; she was the mother of his love, and she thought she detected in him a special weakness for mothers.  But it would have been better if he had respected women and mothers less, for he thought so highly of them that he believed they ought to play fair.

Sitting in a very low chair, she looked up at him.

“Mathilde has been telling me something about a plan of yours to take her to China with you.  We could not consent to that, you know.”