Radwalader laid the miniature on the table.
"It's a very beautiful face," he added. "I wonder if I ever saw her. It's not impossible. I remember meeting your grandfather in Boston."
"You'd hardly have met my mother, though. She died when I was born—twenty years ago. You'd have been quite a boy."
"A boy well out of knickerbockers, then! You flatter me, Vane. Is it possible that you don't know I'm tottering on the ragged edge of fifty?"
"One wouldn't believe it, then. Come in while I brush up a bit."
He led the way into the bedroom, and Radwalader, following, applied himself to the consumption of a cigarette. For three weeks he had been observing Andrew with a new attention. He was always quick to note symptoms, but in the present instance he found himself, to his surprise, unable to analyze them with his accustomed readiness. The change which he saw was singularly subtle, albeit as pronounced as that which a separation of years might have enabled him to perceive. It was with difficulty that he could bring himself to believe that barely a day had gone by without their meeting. It seemed impossible that Andrew had not gone and come again, passing, in the interim, through some vastly significant experience. Radwalader found him less open, while habited with a new assurance; less enthusiastic, while subject at times to an almost feverish gaiety; more alive to the minutest details of the new life which surrounded him, but with a tendency to scoff replacing his former merely boyish interest. There were times when Radwalader would have called him unqualifiedly happy; others when there was no such thing as believing him otherwise than wretched. He was thinner, smiled less than formerly, and took for granted much which had thitherto excited his eager comment, his amusement, or his dislike. Over all he wore a new reserve, a worldliness beyond his years. In all this, while there was much which Radwalader did not fully understand, there was much which he had expected, much which he had deliberately planned His cards had long since been dealt and sorted. Now he chanced a lead.
"I was at Poissy yesterday."
"Ah?"
Andrew appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, diligently towelling his head. As he looked up, his eyes, so curiously like Radwalader's own, were not less coolly non-committal than they.
"How is Mrs. Carnby?" he added.