Mrs. Clephane had sent a note begging him to call her up as soon as he arrived. When his call came she asked if she might dine with him that night, and he replied that she ought to have come without asking. Anne, he supposed, would honour him too?
No, she answered; Anne, the day before, had gone down to the Drovers’ on Long Island. She would probably be away for a few days. And would Fred please ask no one else to dine? He assured her that such an idea would never have occurred to him.
He received her in the comfortable shabby drawing-room which he had never changed since his mother and an old-maid sister had vanished from it years before. He indulged his own tastes in the library upstairs, leaving this chintzy room, with its many armchairs, the Steinway piano and the family Chippendale, much as Kate had known it when old Mrs. Landers had given her a bridal dinner. The memory of that dinner, and of Mrs. Landers, large, silvery, demonstrative, flashed through Mrs. Clephane’s mind. She saw herself in an elaborately looped gown, proudly followed by her husband, and enclosed in her hostess’s rustling embrace, while her present host, crimson with emotion and admiration, hung shyly behind his mother; and the memory gave her a pang of self-pity.
In the middle of the room she paused and looked about her. “It feels like home,” she said, without knowing what she was saying.
A flush almost as agitated as the one she remembered mounted to Landers’s forehead. She saw his confusion and pleasure, and was remotely touched by them.
“You see, I’m homeless,” she explained with a faint smile.
“Homeless?”
“Oh, I can’t remember when I was ever anything else. I’ve been a wanderer for so many years.”
“But not any more,” he smiled.
The double mahogany doors were thrown open. Landers, with his stiff little bow, offered her an arm, and they passed into a dusky flock-papered dining-room which seemed to borrow most of its lighting from the sturdy silver and monumental cut-glass of the dinner-table. A bunch of violets, compact and massive, lay by her plate. Everything about Fred Landers was old-fashioned, solid and authentic. She sank into her chair with a sense of its being a place of momentary refuge. She did not mean to speak till after dinner—then she would tell him everything she thought. “How delicious they are!” she murmured, smelling the violets.