She started up and went to the writing table, pulling out paper and pen with an impatience doubled by her husband's. "Oh, we'll wire," he said in a tone of authority; "I'll get it off at once. We want something from him for our New York number." And she thought, deep in herself: "Nothing will be too good for Vance Weston now that he's Lewis's own discovery," and then tingled with shame at her lucidity. She dashed off the telegram at her husband's dictation, and while Tarrant went out to send it, dropped down again into her armchair.

"If my boy had lived—" she said to herself, covering under that elliptical sweep of regret all the things she might have judged differently, all the things she might have forborne to judge, if between her and her husband there had been a presence, warm and troublesome and absorbing, to draw them closer yet screen them a little from each other.

Chapter 2

One raw autumn evening when Vance came in, tired and dispirited, from the office of the Free Speaker, his elder sister, Pearl, who was always prying and investigating, bounced out into the hall with: "Here's a letter for you from a New York magazine."

Vance followed her into the overheated room where the family were waiting for Mr. Weston to go in to supper. Mr. Weston was generally late nowadays: real estate was in a slack phase at Euphoria, and he was always off somewhere, trying to get hold of a good thing, to extend his activities, especially to get a finger into the pie at Swedenville, which had recently started an unforeseen boom of its own.

There seemed to be a great many people in the brightly lit room, with its large pink-mouthed gramophone on a table with a crochet lace cover, its gold-and-gray wallpaper hung with the "Mona Lisa" (Mae's contribution), "The Light of the World" (Grandma's), and the palm in a congested pink china pot on a stained oak milking stool.

On chilly evenings the radiator was the centre of the family life, and the seat nearest it was now always occupied by a very old man with a yellowish waxen face and a heavy shock of black hair streaked with gray, who sat with a helpless left arm stretched on the shawl that covered his knees, and said at intervals, in a slow thick voice: "Feels … good … here … after … Crampton… ."