“I certainly shouldn’t meet Miss Wilde at home if that is what you mean.”

“It’s bad enough to live in a partitioned cage like this,” resumed Mrs. Trent, in her soft, expressionless voice, “and to dry your clothes on your neighbour’s roofs, but I can bear anything so long as we are not forced to associate with common people.  Of course I don’t expect to find the manners of Virginia up here,” she added as a last concession, “but I may as well confess that the people I’ve come across don’t seem to me to be exactly civil.”

“Just as we don’t seem to them to be particularly worldly-wise, I dare say.”

She nodded her head, almost without hearing him, while her even tones rippled on over her quaint ideas, which shone to her son’s mind like little silver pebbles beneath the shallow stream.

“I’m almost reconciled to the fact that old ladies wear colours and flowers in their bonnets,” she pursued, “to say nothing of low-neck dresses, but it does seem to me that they might show a little ordinary politeness.  I met the doctor coming out of the apartment downstairs, so in common decency I went immediately to enquire who was sick, and carried along a glass of chicken jelly.  The woman who opened the door was rather rude,” she finished with a sigh.  “I don’t believe such a thing had ever happened to her before in the whole course of her life.”

Trent gave her a tender glance across the coffee service.

“Probably not,” he admitted, “but I wouldn’t waste my jelly if I were you.”

“I sha’n’t” she determined sadly, “and that’s the thing I miss most of all—­visiting the sick.”

“You might devote yourself to the hospitals—­there are plenty of them it seems.”

Her resignation, however, was complete, and she showed no impulse to reach out actively again.  “It wouldn’t be the same, my dear—­I don’t want strange paupers but real friends.  Do you know,” she added, with a despair that was almost abject, “I was counting up this morning the people I might speak to if I met them in the street, and I got them in easily on the fingers of one hand.  That included,” she confessed after a hesitation, “the doctor, the butcher’s boy and the woman who comes to scrub.  It would surprise you to find what a very interesting woman she is.”

Trent rose from his chair and, coming round to where she sat, gave her a boyish hug of sympathy.  “You’re a regular angel of a mother,” he said and added playfully, while he still held her, “even then I don’t see how you make it five.”

She put up her large white hand and smoothed his hair across his forehead.  “That’s only because I made an acquaintance in the elevator yesterday,” she replied.

“In the elevator!  How?”

“The thing always makes me nervous, you know—­I can’t abide it, and I’d much rather any day go up and down the seven flights—­but she met me as I started to walk and persuaded me to come inside.  Then she held my hand until I got quite to the bottom.”