Mrs. Wappinger threw down the letter with the emphasis of gesture which was one of her characteristics.

“There!” she exclaimed, in a loud, hearty voice, not without a note of triumph; “that’s what I call a chance.”

“Chance for what, mother?”

“Chance for a good many things—­and first of all for bearding Lucilla van Tromp right in her own den.”

“I don’t see—­”

“No; but I do.  We’re on to a big thing.  I’ve got to go right there; and she’s got to come right here.  She’s held off, and she’s kept me off; but now the ice’ll be broken with a regular thaw.”

“Still, I don’t see.  It’s one thing to invite her, to oblige old man Van Tromp; but it’s another thing to get her to come.”

“She’ll come fast enough—­this time; she’ll come as if she was shot here by a secret spring.  There is a secret spring, you may take my word for it.  I don’t know what it is, and I don’t care; it’s enough for me to know that it’s in good working order—­which it is, if James van Tromp has got his hand on it.  James van Tromp may look like a fool and talk like a fool, but he isn’t a fool—­No, sir!”

It is commonly believed that a woman never thinks otherwise than gently of the man who has wanted to marry her; and if this be the rule, Mrs. Wappinger was no exception to it.  As she sat on the sofa in her son’s room, the mere mention of the old man’s name, attended by the kindly opinion she had just expressed, sent her off into sudden reverie.  While it was quite true that, in her own phrase, she “would no more have married him than she would have married a mole,” it was none the less flattering to have been desired.  The onlooker, like Lucilla van Tromp or Derek Pruyn, might wonder what were those hidden forces of affinity which led a man to single Mrs. Wappinger out of all the women in the world; but to Mrs. Wappinger herself the circumstance could not be otherwise than pleasing.

Seeing her pensive, Carli swung himself back to the keyboard again, pounding out a few bars of the dance music in Strauss’ Salome, of which the score lay open before him.  He was a good-looking young man of twenty-two, of whom any mother, not too exacting, might be proud.  Very blond—­with well-chiselled features and waving hair—­not so tall as to make his excessive slimness seem disproportionate—­there was something in the perfection with which he was “turned out” that gave him the air of a “creation.”  Mrs. Wappinger’s joy in him was the more satisfying because of the fact that, relative to herself, he was in the line of progress.  He was the blossom of culture, travel, and sport, borne by her own strenuous generation of successful material effort.  To the things to which he had attained she felt that in a certain sense she had attained herself, on the principle of facit per alium, facit per se. In the social position she had reached it was a pleasure to know that Harvard, Europe, and money had given Carli a refinement that made up in some measure for her own deficiencies.