With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the office. This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of his surroundings.
He shook himself and began to read the letter.
“Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are laid up. Burn this as soon as you've read it. Louis Bassett has started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person we discussed out of town as soon as possible. Bassett is up to mischief. I'm not signing this fully, for obvious reasons. G.”
XVII
The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather low white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family exodus to the Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out over the terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family was “in residence.” Originally designed as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it the year round. There was nothing there, as there was in the town house, to remind her of the bitter days before her widowhood.
She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste whatever in her clothing.
“I never know,” said Harrison Miller, “when I look up at the Sayre place, whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning.”
She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in the main, tolerant and maternal. She liked young people, gave gay little parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors and all cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and was anxious to see Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled down. Between her son and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She viewed him through eyes that had lost their illusion about all men years ago, and she had no delusions about him. She had no idea that she knew all that he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the veil of his private life.
“He spends a great deal of money,” she said one day to her lawyer. “I suppose in the usual ways. But he is not quite like his father. He has real affections, which his father hadn't. If he marries the right girl she can make him almost anything.”