"Father Everlasting!" The words, and the way in which Max Elliot had spoken them, struck into her heart, and so made her feel keenly that she was a girl who had a heart that was not hard, that was eager, desirous, perhaps deep. As to Paul Lane, he stared at his remarkably perfect boots, and drew down the corners of his lips, and his white face seemed to darken as if a cloud floated through his mind and cast a shadow outward.
In the pause the drawing-room door opened, and a woman with blazing dark eyes and snow-white hair, wearing a white tea-gown and a necklace of very fine Egyptian scarabs, came in, with an intense, self-possessed and inquiring look. This was Mrs. Mansfield, "my only mother," as Charmian sometimes absurdly called her.
"You are talking, or you were talking, of something or somebody interesting," she said at once, looking round her at the three occupants of the room.
Max Elliott turned eagerly toward her. He rejoiced in Mrs. Mansfield, and often came to her to "warm his hands at her delightful blaze."
"Of somebody very interesting."
"Whom we don't know?"
"Whom very few people in London know."
"A composer, my only mother, who never publishes, and who is the son of a banker in the West of England."
Charmian seemed suddenly to have recovered her former mood, but she blinked away two tears as she spoke.
"Why shouldn't he be?" said Mrs. Mansfield, sitting down on a large sofa which stood at right angles to the wood fire.