Kate sighed and turned from the picture. The few words they had exchanged—the technical phrases she had used—had called up a time when the vocabulary of the studio was forever in her ears, and she wanted, at that moment, to escape from it as quickly as she could.
Against the opposite wall was a deep sofa, books and a reading-lamp beside it. Kate paused. “That’s just where your crib used to stand!” She turned to the fireplace with an unsteady laugh. “I can see you by the hearth, in your little chair, with the fire shining through your bush of hair, and your toys on the shelf in front of you. You thought the sparks were red birds in a cage, and you used to try to coax them through the fender with bits of sugar.”
“Oh, did I? You darling, to remember!” The girl put an arm about Kate. It seemed to the mother, as the young warmth flowed through her, that everything else had vanished, and that together they were watching the little girl with the bush of hair coaxing the sparks through the fender.
Anne had left her, and Mrs. Clephane, alone in her window, looked down on the new Fifth Avenue. As it surged past, a huge lava-flow of interlaced traffic, her tired bewildered eyes seemed to see the buildings move with the vehicles, as a stationary train appears to move to travellers on another line. She fancied that presently even the little Washington Square Arch would trot by, heading the tide of sky-scrapers from the lower reaches of the city.... Oppressed and confused, she rejected the restless vision and called up in its place the old Fifth Avenue, the Fifth Avenue still intact at her marriage, a thoroughfare of monotonously ugly brown houses divided by a thin trickle of horse-drawn carriages; and she saw her mother-in-law, in just such a richly-curtained window, looking down, with dry mental comments, on old Mrs. Chivers’s C-spring barouche and Mrs. Beaufort’s new chestnut steppers, and knowing how long ago the barouche had been imported from Paris, and how much had been paid for the steppers—for Mrs. Clephane senior belonged to the generation which still surveyed its world from an upper window, like the Dutch ancestresses to whom the doings of the street were reported by a little mirror.
The contrast was too great; Kate Clephane felt herself too much a part of that earlier day. The overwhelming changes had all happened, in a whirl, during the years of her absence; and meanwhile she had been living in quiet backwaters, or in the steady European capitals where renewals make so little mark on the unyielding surface of the past. She turned back into the room, seeking refuge in its familiar big-patterned chintz, the tufted lounge, the woolly architecture of the carpet. It was thoughtful of Anne to have left her.... They were both beginning to be oppressed again by a sense of obstruction: the packed memories of their so different pasts had jammed the passages between them. Anne had visibly felt that, and with a light kiss slipped out. “She’s perfect,” her mother thought, a little frightened....
She said to herself: “I’m dead tired—” put on a dressing-gown, dismissed the hovering Aline, and lay down by the fire. Then, in the silence, when the door had shut, she understood how excited she was, and how impossible it would be to rest.
Her eyes wandered about the unchanged scene, and into the equally familiar bedroom beyond—the “best spare-room” of old days. There hung the same red-eyed Beatrice Cenci above the double bed. John Clephane’s parents had travelled in the days when people still brought home copies of the Old Masters; and a mixture of thrift and filial piety had caused John Clephane to preserve their collection in the obscurer corners of his house. Kate smiled at the presiding genius selected to guard the slumbers of married visitors (as Ribera monks and Caravaggio gamblers darkened the digestive processes in the dining-room); she smiled, as she so often had—but now without bitterness—at the naïve incongruities of that innocent and inquisitorial past. Then her eye lit on the one novelty in the room: the telephone at her elbow. Oh, to talk to some one—to talk to Fred Landers, instantly! “There are too many things I don’t know ... I’m too utterly in the dark,” she murmured. She rushed through the directory, found his number, and assailed his parlour-maid with questions. But Mr. Landers was not at home; the parlour-maid’s inflexion signified: “At this hour?” and a glance at the clock showed Kate that the endless day had barely reached mid-afternoon. Of course he would not be at home. But the parlour-maid added: “He’s always at his office till five.”
His office! Fred Landers had an office—had one still! Kate remembered that two-and-twenty years ago, after lunching with them, he used always to glance at his watch and say: “Time to get back to the office.” And he was well-off—always had been. He needn’t—needn’t! What on earth did he do there, she wondered? What results, pecuniary or other, had he to show for his quarter-century of “regular hours”? She remembered that his profession had been legal—most of one’s men friends, in those remote days, were lawyers. But she didn’t fancy he had ever appeared in court; people consulted him about investments, he looked after estates. For the last years, very likely, his chief business had been to look after Anne’s; no doubt he was one of John Clephane’s executors, and also old Mrs. Clephane’s. One pictured him as deeply versed in will-making and will-interpreting: he had always, in his dry mumbling way, rather enjoyed a quibble over words. Kate thought, by the way, that he mumbled less, spoke more “straight from the shoulder,” than he used to. Perhaps it was experience, authority, the fact of being consulted and looked up to, that had changed the gaunt shambling Fred Landers of old days into the four-square sort of man who had met her on the pier and disentangled her luggage with so little fuss. Oh, yes, she was sure the new Fred Landers could help her—advice was just what she wanted, and what, she suspected, he liked to give.
She called up his office, and in less than a minute there was his calm voice asking what he could do.