insisted on a
visitation.

The child-element, of late, had not been large in her life. Her two tall
stepsons were flourishing in absence; she had had no second child of her
own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well....
But there was her own flesh and blood crying for her--perhaps. So she
descended on the old, familiar interior--familiar and distasteful--and
resumed with zeal the role of mother.

Her presence was awkward, anomalous. The servants were disconcerted, and
scarcely knew how to take her fluttery yet imperious orders. For Raymond
himself, as any one could see, it was all purgatory--or worse. Every
room had its peculiar and disagreeable memories. There was the
chamber-threshold over which they had discussed her tendency to out-mode
the mode and to push every extreme of fashion to an extreme still more
daring--for that black gown with spangles, or whatever, had been but the
first of a long, flagrant line. There was the particular spot in the
front hall, before that monumental, old-fashioned, black-walnut
"hat-rack," where he had cautioned more care in her attitude toward
young bachelors, if only in consideration of his own dignity, his
"face." There was the dining-room--yes, she stayed to meals, of course,
and to many of them!--where (in the temporary absence of service) he
had criticized more than once the details of her housekeeping and of her
menu--had told her just how he "wanted things" and how he meant to have
them. And in each case she had pouted, or scoffed, and had contrived
somehow to circumvent him, to thwart him, and to get with well-cloaked,
or with uncloaked, insistence her own way. Heavenly recollections! He
felt, too, from her various glances and shrugs, that the house was more
of a horror to her than ever, and, above all, that abominable
orchestrion more hugely preposterous.

Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond
himself had occupied as a boy. It had the same view of that window above
the stable at which Johnny McComas had sorted his insects and arranged
his stamps. The stable was now, of course, a garage; but the time was on
the way when both car and chauffeur would be dispensed with. Parallel
wires still stretched between house and garage, as an evidence of
Raymond's endeavor to fill in the remnant of Albert's previous vacation
with some entertaining novelty that might help wipe out his recollection
of the month lately spent with his mothe