“It wouldn’t seem so,” Rachael said, looking at the life-size statues of Moorish and Neopolitan girls, the mantel clock representing a Dutch windmill, the mantel itself, of black marble, gilded and columned, with a mirror in a carved walnut frame stretching ten feet above it, the beaded fire screen, the voluminous window curtains of tasselled rep, and the ornate walnut table across whose marble top a strip of lace had been laid.  Everything was ugly and expensive and almost everything was old-fashioned, all the level surfaces of tables, mantel, and piano top were filled with small articles, bits of ivory carving from China, leather boxes, majolica jars, photographs in heavy frames, enormous illustrated books, candlesticks, and odd teacups and trays.

Smiling down—­how Rachael knew that smile, half-quizzical and half-tender—­from a corner of the room was a beautiful oil portrait of Warren Gregory, the one really fine thing in the room.  By some chance the painter had caught on his face the very look with which he might, in the flesh, have studied this dreadful room.  Rachael felt a thrill go to her heels as she looked back at the canvas, and far down in the deeps of her being the thought stirred that some day her hand might be the one to change all this—­to make the woodwork colonial white, and the paper rich with color, to have the black marble changed to creamy tiles, and the rep curtains torn away.  Then how charming the place would be when visitors came in from the hot street!

“A million apologies—­all my fault!” said Doctor Gregory in the doorway.  His mother, in rustling black silk, was on his arm.  She had given up her cane to-day to use the living support, and no lover could have wished to appear more charming in his lady’s eyes than did Warren Gregory appear to Rachael as he lowered the frail old figure to a chair and neglected his guests while he made his mother comfortable.

“He would have you think, now, that I was the cause of the delay,” said the old lady in a sweet voice that betrayed curiously the weakness of the flesh and the strength of the spirit.  “But I assure you my beauty is no longer a matter of great importance to me!”

“So it was Greg who was curling his hair?” Rachael asked, with one swift and eloquent glance for him before she drew a much-fringed hassock to his mother’s knee and seated herself there with the confidence of a captivating child.  “I always thought he was rather vain!  But let’s not talk about him, we only make him worse.  Tell me about yourself?”

Mrs. Gregory was a rather spirited old lady, and liked to fancy, with the pathetic complacency of the passing generation, that her sense of humor quite kept up with the times.  Rachael knew her well, and knew all her stories, but this only made her the pleasanter companion.  She quickly carried the conversation into the past, and was content to be a listener; indeed, with a hostess far removed in type from herself it was the only safe role to play.  The conversation was full of pitfalls for this charming and dutiful worldling, and Rachael was too clever to risk a fall.