As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, "And you—?"
His answer carried the shock of an evocation. "I merely asked her what she thought of you."
"Of me?"
"She admires you immensely, you know."
For a moment Mrs. Quentin's cheek showed the lingering light of girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the transmitter's merit. "Well—?" she smiled.
"Well—you didn't make my father give up the Radiator, did you?"
His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: "She never comes here. How can she know me?"
"She's so poor! She goes out so little." He rose and leaned against the mantel-piece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish ivories. "And then her mother—" he added, as if involuntarily.
"Her mother has never visited me," Mrs. Quentin finished for him.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll. Her rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother's sampler."