At supper Mrs. Winscombe sat at his left, Caroline and Myrtle had taken their customary places opposite, the elders had not been disturbed.  Mrs. Winscombe had resumed the animation vanished at noon.  She wore green and white, with plum-coloured ribbons, and a flat shirred cap tied under her chin.  The fluted, clear lawn of her elbow sleeves was like a scented mist.  He was again conscious of the warm seduction, the rare finish, of her body, like a flushed marble under wide hoops and dyed silk.  She was talking to Myrtle about the Court.  “I am in waiting with the Princess Amelia Sophia,” she explained; “I have her stockings.  There is a frightful racket of music and parrots and German, with old Handel bellowing and the King eternally clinking one piece of gold on another.”

Gilbert Penny listened with a tightening of his well shaped lips.  “It’s into that chamber pot we pour our sweat and iron,” he asserted.  Ludowika Winscombe studied him.  “In England,” she said, “the American provinces are supposed to lie hardly beyond the Channel, but here England seems to be at the other end of the world.”  Myrtle added, “I’d like it immensely.”

And Howat thought of Ludowika—­he thought of her tentatively as Ludowika—­in the brilliant setting of tropical silks and birds.

He considered the change that had overtaken his father, English born, in the quarter century he had lived in America; the strong allegiance formed to ideas fundamentally different from those held at St. James; and he wondered if such a transformation would operate in Ludowika if she could remain in the Province.  It was a fantastic query, and he impatiently dismissed it, returning to the contemplation of his mother’s problematic happiness.  He determined to question the latter if a permissible occasion arose; suddenly his interest had sharpened toward her mental situation.  He compared the two women, what he could conjecture about Isabel Howat and Ludowika Winscombe; but something within him, automatic and certain, whispered that no comparison was possible.  His mother possessed a quality of spirit that he had never found elsewhere; he could see, in spite of their resemblance of blood and position, that the elder could never have been merely provocative.  Such distinctions, he divined, were the result of qualities mysterious and deeply concealed.  Love, that he had once dismissed as the principle of blind procreation, became more complex, enigmatic.  He had no increased desire to experience it, with the inevitable loss of personal liberty; but he began to be conscious of new depths, unexpected complications, in human relationship.

He was not so sure of himself.

They had moved to the less formal of the rooms used as places of gathering.  The bed in a corner was hung in blue shalloon over ruffled white muslin, and there was blue at the windows.  Against the wall a clavichord, set aside as obsolete, raised its dusky red ebony box on grooved legs.  Myrtle was seated at it picking out an air from Belshazzar.  She held each note in a silvery vibration that had the fragility of old age.  Ludowika was by the fire, quartered across a corner; there was no stove, and the wood burning in the opening sent out frequent, pungent waves of smoke.  She coughed and cursed.  “Positively,” she declared, “I’ll turn salt like a smoked herring.”