"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.
For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait, set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.
It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.
After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of his father's presence in the doorway.
There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr. had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture.
Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of gathering clouds.
Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both, which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed the lightnings.
The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order.