Guardian and ward exchanged another smile, in which Kate felt herself generously included; then Landers’s eye turned to hers. “You’re not a bit changed, you know.”
“Oh, come! Nonsense.” Again she checked that silly “look at my gray hair.” “I hope one never is, to old friends—after the first shock, at any rate.”
“There wasn’t any first shock. I spotted you at once, from the pier.”
Anne intervened in her calm voice. “I recognized mother too—from such a funny old photograph, in a dress with puffed sleeves.”
Mrs. Clephane tried to smile. “I don’t know, darling, if I recognized you.... You were just there ... in me ... where you’ve always been....” She felt her voice breaking, and was glad to have Mr. Landers burst in with: “And what do you say to our new Fifth Avenue?”
She stood surveying its upper reaches, that afternoon, from the window of the sitting-room Anne had assigned to her. Yes; Fred Landers was right, it was a new, an absolutely new, Fifth Avenue; but there was nothing new about Anne’s house. Incongruously enough—in that fluid city, where the stoutest buildings seemed like atoms forever shaken into new patterns by the rumble of Undergrounds and Elevateds—the house was the very one which had once been Kate’s, the home to which, four-and-twenty years earlier, she had been brought as a bride.
Her house, since she had been its mistress; but never hers in the sense of her having helped to make it. John Clephane lived by proverbs. One was that fools built houses for wise men to live in; so he had bought a fool’s house, furniture and all, and moved into it on his marriage. But if it had been built by a fool, Kate sometimes used to wonder, how was it that her husband found it to be planned and furnished so exactly as he would have chosen? He never tired of boasting of the fact, seemingly unconscious of the unflattering inference to be drawn; perhaps, if pressed, he would have said there was no contradiction, since the house had cost the fool a great deal to build, and him, the wise man, very little to buy. It had been, he was never tired of repeating, a bargain, the biggest kind of a bargain; and that, somehow, seemed a reason (again Kate didn’t see why) for leaving everything in it unchanged, even to the heraldic stained glass on the stairs and the Jacobean mantel in a drawing-room that ran to Aubusson.... And here it all was again, untouched, unworn—the only difference being that she, Kate, was installed in the visitor’s suite on the third floor (swung up to it in a little jewel-box of a lift), instead of occupying the rooms below which had once been “Papa’s and Mamma’s”. The change struck her at once—and the fact that Anne, taking her up, had first pressed the wrong button, the one for the floor below, and then reddened in correcting her mistake. The girl evidently guessed that her mother would prefer not to go back to those other rooms; her having done so gave Kate a quick thrill.
“You don’t mind being so high up, mother?”
“I like it ever so much better, dear.”