“Yes, my dear?”

Noticing his presence, and continuing to put bottles into the basket, she answered: 

“I thought I must—­they’re what dear Mother’s given us.”

There they lay—­little bottles filled with white and brown fluids, white and blue and brown powders; green and brown and yellow ointments; black lozenges; buff plasters; blue and pink and purple pills.  All beautifully labelled and corked.

And he said in a rather faltering voice: 

“Bless her!  How she does give her things away!  Haven’t we used any?”

“Not one.  And they have to be cleared away before they’re stale, for fear we might take one by mistake.”

“Poor Mother!”

“My dear, she’s found something newer than them all by now.”

Felix sighed.

“The nomadic spirit.  I have it, too!”

And a sudden vision came to him of his mother’s carved ivory face, kept free of wrinkles by sheer will-power, its firm chin, slightly aquiline nose, and measured brows; its eyes that saw everything so quickly, so fastidiously, its compressed mouth that smiled sweetly, with a resolute but pathetic acceptation.  Of the piece of fine lace, sometimes black, sometimes white, over her gray hair.  Of her hands, so thin now, always moving a little, as if all the composure and care not to offend any eye by allowing Time to ravage her face, were avenging themselves in that constant movement.  Of her figure, that was short but did not seem so, still quick-moving, still alert, and always dressed in black or gray.  A vision of that exact, fastidious, wandering spirit called Frances Fleeming Freeland—­that spirit strangely compounded of domination and humility, of acceptation and cynicism; precise and actual to the point of desert dryness; generous to a point that caused her family to despair; and always, beyond all things, brave.

Flora dropped the last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the bath let her eyebrows rise.  How pleasant was that impersonal humor which made her superior to other wives!

“You—­nomadic?  How?”

“Mother travels unceasingly from place to place, person to person, thing to thing.  I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to mind; my native air is also desert air—­hence the sterility of my work.”

Flora rose, but her eyebrows descended.

“Your work,” she said, “is not sterile.”

“That, my dear,” said Felix, “is prejudice.”  And perceiving that she was going to kiss him, he waited without annoyance.  For a woman of forty-two, with two children and three books of poems—­and not knowing which had taken least out of her—­with hazel-gray eyes, wavy eyebrows darker than they should have been, a glint of red in her hair; wavy figure and lips; quaint, half-humorous indolence, quaint, half-humorous warmth—­was she not as satisfactory a woman as a man could possibly have married!