felt as if a world was opening out
before her, as if there were wide horizons to call to the gaze of those
fitted to look upon them, and as if, perhaps, she were one of these
elect.

"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.

"I know, but it doesn't seem right."

"Don't be ridiculously conventional, my only child."

Charmian laughed, showing lovely, and very small teeth. She was not
unlike her mother in feature, but she was taller, more dreamy, less
vivid, less straightforward in expression. At times there was a hint of
the minx in her. She emerged from her dreams to be impertinent. A
certain shrewdness mingled with her audacity. At such moments, as men
sometimes said, "you never knew where to have her." She was more
self-conscious and more worldly than her mother. Secret ambition worried
at her mind, and made her restless in body. When she looked at a crowd
she sometimes felt an almost sick sensation as of one near to drowning.
"Oh, to rise, to be detached from all these myriads!" she thought. "To
be apart