The snow was falling, blown by a keen wind, and the great side window of Mrs. Mavering's house glowed warmly through the sharp, slanting lines of the snow. It occurred to him that he would rather talk to Mrs. Mavering that night than summon only spectral visitations from Saint Mary's organ. At that moment Helen clung with warm fingers to Mrs. Mavering's hand, saying, "I shall call you Lady Rachel, because you're beautiful."
[Chapter VIII]
Of Mrs. Mavering, and of the Philosophy of the Individual
Helen put her forehead against the cold window.
"It's snowing. Do you think he'll play to-night? But he would if he knew we wanted to hear him, wouldn't he?"
"If he knew that we knew he knew it, he probably would."
The fire glowed and snapped, and reflected its varying mood on the andirons and the red-and-white tiles of the fireplace. Mrs. Mavering, garmented in black and dusky red, lay back in a deep chair, and the firelight played across her face and dress in a more subdued manner than on the tiles and andirons, as if it felt that was not the right place to be familiar and reckless.
"Why?"
"Men take great pains to be nice to us if they see their sacrifice is in the way to be appreciated. They would rather have the sacrifice appreciated than the service. Oh, it isn't like that, dear eyes!—not nearly so solemn!" Helen had come and curled herself at Mrs. Mavering's feet to consider this proposition. "If you always look at me so you'll frighten me out of all my little cynicisms, and I think them pretty."
Mrs. Mavering reminded one of something costly, like a vase upon which some master-workman had spent himself, careless of time, considering only line and curve, and how it might be made to glow from within and be more than worthy of the palace of the king; and as if afterwards, when the palace had been sacked, and fallen with ruin and wailing, and the vase had somehow escaped destruction, it had come to stand in the guarded corner of a museum. In this meaning Thaddeus had spoken of her as something to be seen rather than some one to know. Thaddeus's social instinct was quick, and sometimes accurate. He need not have been so mistaken, understood as implying the general facts of a period in Mrs. Mavering's life.