its objects.  The inevitable process of idealization began.  In dusty offices I recalled her freshness as she had sat beside me in the garden,—­the freshness of a flower; with Berkeleyan subjectivism I clothed the flower with colour, bestowed it with fragrance.  I conferred on Maude all the gifts and graces that woman had possessed since the creation.  And I recalled, with mingled bitterness and tenderness, the turn of her head, the down on her neck, the half-revealed curve of her arm....  In spite of the growing sordidness of Lyme Street, my mother and I still lived in the old house, for which she very naturally had a sentiment.  In vain I had urged her from time to time to move out into a brighter and fresher neighbourhood.  It would be time enough, she said, when I was married.

“If you wait for that, mother,” I answered, “we shall spend the rest of our lives here.”

“I shall spend the rest of my life here,” she would declare.  “But you—­you have your life before you, my dear.  You would be so much more contented if—­if you could find some nice girl.  I think you live—­too feverishly.”

I do not know whether or not she suspected me of being in love, nor indeed how much she read of me in other ways.  I did not confide in her, nor did it strike me that she might have yearned for confidences; though sometimes, when I dined at home, I surprised her gentle face—­framed now with white hair—­lifted wistfully toward me across the table.  Our relationship, indeed, was a pathetic projection of that which had existed in my childhood; we had never been confidants then.  The world in which I lived and fought, of great transactions and merciless consequences frightened her; her own world was more limited than ever.  She heard disquieting things, I am sure, from Cousin Robert Breck, who had become more and more querulous since the time-honoured firm of Breck and Company had been forced to close its doors and the home at Claremore had been sold.  My mother often spent the day in the scrolled suburban cottage with the coloured glass front door where he lived with the Kinleys and Helen....

If my mother suspected that I was anticipating marriage, and said nothing, Nancy Durrett suspected and spoke out.

Life is such a curious succession of contradictions and surprises that I record here without comment the fact that I was seeing much more of Nancy since her marriage than I had in the years preceding it.  A comradeship existed between us.  I often dined at her house and had fallen into the habit of stopping there frequently on my way home in the evening.  Ham did not seem to mind.  What was clear, at any rate, was that Nancy, before marriage, had exacted some sort of an understanding by which her “freedom” was not to be interfered with.  She was the first among us of the “modern wives.”