It was a bare room, and, by the glare of the gas that lighted it, he saw that the influence of Mr. Merrow had penetrated at least thus far beyond his threshold. The floor was covered by a carpet in the flowery taste of 1860. The chairs were upholstered in thick, hot-hued plush, with a geometric pattern embossed upon it. A vast procession of little vases and things in porcelain, multiplied by the mantel-mirror and the pier-glass, shed an added forlornness on the spaces they were meant to decorate, but only cluttered up, Pauline’s domain, he concluded, would be above stairs.
The door swung open after a few minutes, and he rose, with a sudden heart-leap, to greet her. But no—it was only a fat, uninteresting-looking woman (a visitor, a sister-in-law, he reasoned swiftly) come to make Pauline’s excuses, probably, if she kept him waiting. He noticed that the fat lady was in mourning; and that confirmed his guess that she would prove to be a relative of the late Mr. Merrow. She wore her hair in a series of stiff ringlets (“bandelettes” I believe they are technically called) over a high, sloping forehead; the hair was thin and stringy, so that, he told himself, her brother had no doubt been bald. Two untransparent eyes gazed placidly out of the white expanses of her face; and he thought, as he took her in, that she might serve as an incarnation of all the dulness and platitude that he had felt in the air about him from the hour of his landing in New York.
However, he stood there, silent, making a sort of interrogative bow, and waiting for her to state her business.
She had seemed to be studying him with some curiosity, of a mild, phlegmatic kind, from which he argued that perhaps she was not wholly unenlightened about his former relation to her brother’s widow. But now he experienced a distinct spasm of horror, as she threw her head to one side, and, opening her lips, remarked lymphatically, in a resigned, unresonant voice, “Well, I declare! Is that you, Harry Aigrefield? Why, you’re as gray as a rat!”
He sank back into his chair, overwhelmed by the abrupt disenchantment; and he understood that it was reciprocal.
IV
He sat, inert, amid the pieces of his broken idol, for perhaps a half hour, and chatted with Mrs. Merrow of various things. She asked him if he was still as crazy about painting pictures as he used to be: to which he answered, with a hollow laugh, that he feared he was. Well, she said, playfully, she presumed there always had to be some harum-scarum people in the world; and added that “Sam” had “simply coined money” as a cotton-broker, and left her very well off. He had died of pneumonia, following an attack of the “grip.”
“I suppose it seems kind of funny to you, getting back to America after so many years?” she queried, languidly “Things are considerably changed.”
He admitted that this was true, and bade her good-night. She went with him to the door, where she gave him an inelastic handshake, accompanied by an invitation to call again.
In his bedroom at the hotel he sat before his window till late into the night, smoking cigarettes, and trying to pull himself together. The last lingering afterglow of his youth had been put out; and therewith the whole colour of the universe was altered. He felt that he had reversed the case of the bourgeois gentilhomme, and been dealing in bad poetry for twenty years,—in other words, making a sentimental ass of himself; and his chagrin at this was as sharp as his grief over his recent disillusion.