The Englishman stood decently to receive those invited to meet him and no one wasted a minute on him. In a mild aside to those of us within hearing, he said that it was very New York. He stood watching the people who did not so much as glance at him because already they knew how he looked. They were in perpetual motion. They drew together and fell apart; and so quickly did they shift from group to group that one got the impression of their never quite closing their lips: what they had started to say in one group was continued in the next group in which they found themselves. It is impossible to accost a scuttling mouse: they dashed past the guest of honour with terrifying speed. The noise of the conclave surged down the stairs; and such was the volume of this concatenation that the elderly lady who now, with the most beautiful suddenness, appeared at the head of the stairs must have had to push against it as against material opposition. But this opposition which was not consciously directed against her had had, evidently, the effect of stiffening some as yet unrevealed resolution. Also, she might have been upheld by many taffeta petticoats. She was alone but gave the impression of being attended. And such was the security of her evident faith in her impregnable position that, too shrewd not to perceive that the crowd ignored her, she waved aside any discomfort arising from this by her own sweeping condemnation of all that she saw. Her cold grey eyes travelled from face to face, appraising with a complete and icy detachment--no interest whatever in who it might be the orbit of whose flight she chanced to observe.

Beyond a few curious glances, the milling crowd paid no attention to her. From his far doorway, Spencer Mapes, however, stared with absorption. James Pomeroy, adjusting his pince-nez, his fingers using on its narrow black ribbon the tenderness of touch that he would use on a rare old book, came up to say to the Englishman, “I saw her--on her way here, although it didn’t occur to me that she could conceivably be on the way here--driving uptown in a horse-drawn carriage!” But, at one time or another, most people had seen her maroon brougham with a red-faced coachman in a puce livery expertly handling a pair of bays. She might be said to be the last of the old buildings now in process of demolition. In a backwash formed by the elderly lady’s antagonistic near presence, the small cluster of us stood staring. Novelists stare because they never know when they will use a person as a character in a story. They stare without blinking, making no excuse to the object of their fixed regard; they are working a photographic memory. And here was a middle-aged woman who declined to appear younger than she was. It was a find. We examined her in unabashed glee.

On her own part, she looked at us and refused to see us. About her there was something of the lone knight girded for the combat. Her purpose was so definite that by it she was set aside from the people who aimlessly charged past; she waited for an opponent upon whom the eyes of her mind were already fixed. I think that we might have talked about her at the top of our lungs and she would not have stirred a muscle of her face, so bent was she on an exact aim. She was a force which had surged in on us. We felt her presence. But I got the impression that in spite of the opposition of her ignoring quiescence she watched us. She feared something; and that she refused to acknowledge the existence of this apprehension did not minimize it. On some one issue she had staked a thing so big that she quailed at the failure she had not yet in her soul acknowledged to be possible. Her hands, in too-small white gloves, clasped each other so tightly that the kid stretched, and drew, and bulged. But her face was composed--old ivory in its hard finish. Her decorous feet, in high buttoned boots, rested side by side, and it was evidently with an effort of her muscles that she kept them so properly on the floor; for she was by now seated on one of those dreadful hotel sofas that are slippery and are too high. About her there was something charming, and something forbidding, and through all, and arising from the cause of all, this emanation of terror. I got the idea that she forbade us to approach her because of this terror. But what that would touch her could we bring down on her?

Molly Underhill suggested: “She does look like a scared rat.” She looked like nothing of the sort; her fear was not fear of the fight but of what might cause the fight.

James Pomeroy said that he took his hat off to her. “I never before saw such iron self-control. Do you notice that she doesn’t tap her foot on the floor, as all women under stress do? For you’ll admit that she’s under stress?”

The Englishman undertook to explain her: he also was analysing her for future use. “I have an old aunt,” he began. “That generation of nice old ladies had no use for their own sex. You notice that her attention is riveted on Spencer Mapes? Oh--unobtrusively, delicately; but with such passion of feeling!”

“Spence wouldn’t see her even if she were younger. We all know--although we deny it, and can’t after all explain the ramifications of it--that he has eyes for no one besides Eva Litchfield. I’m not sure it’s love----” speculated Florence Quincy, who did not care. This was an old question with us; none of us cared; but, not necessarily with viciousness but with the greatest persistence, we dissected Spencer Mapes’ intentions towards Eva.

The Englishman murmured that he intended making a virtue of his necessity to know more of her. He approached the elderly lady and enquired if there were something he could do for her. He was a huge man with a kind pink-and-white face and a gasping voice. Her own voice, when she replied, was dry as bone-dust, but she stated, graciously enough, that she recognized him by his pictures. Severely she added that she had thought the reception was given to him. And her somewhat acrid amusement, when he replied that so he had been given to understand, proved that her fear was not of the guests now hovering near.

She said: “I came to get my son.” There was finality about her announcement. In the same tone she might have said “I came to snatch my son from hell fire.”

“Your son, then, is a writer?” the Englishman ventured.

Her figure tightened: it was impossible for her to draw herself up; so far as one could see, she had drawn herself up at birth and never let go. “We have no artists in our family,” she gave him back. She remarked that she was Mrs. Schuyler Van Suydam, and added more kindly: “My son is by way of being an architect. Possibly, in England also, you permit your sons to play before they settle down?” She had disposed of the question of how she came to be there and was done with him. She swept the room with her disapproval, and turned her chilling regard back to the Englishman and disapproved of him. In spite of the alleged paucity of such stuff in her family, she was a great pantomime artist. She sat on her sofa--squarely in the middle as if to defy an author to sit beside her. But I saw that her throat was convulsed. Her eyes were bleak with more than her aversion to her surroundings.

The Englishman indulged in his soundless laughter. Throughout an attack of this mirth, he might be without emotion of any sort, so expressionless would be his face; it might be a physical instead of a mental spasm. He swallowed every second word of his reply, and on the resulting incoherence took himself off. He again mentioned his old aunt to us. He became so amused at the recollection that he gasped himself out of telling more. The old aunt remained in our memory as one who could well have been what is called a character. One had, always, to supplement what the Englishman recounted.

We had noticed, with annoyance, the presence at the tea of two intruders who were not potential characters. These intruders Mrs. Van Suydam now summoned. We did not see by what method she summoned them; when she summoned anyone, that person felt it in the air, possibly. But we heard her say to the young man “I shall be obliged if you will fetch my son.” Anthony Bloodgood was always in a state of high enjoyment; he laughed with his hazel eyes, and smiled with his too-small mouth over which he wore a little moustache because to twirl its speculative ends gave him something to do. He stood tugging at the ridiculous moustache. It was plain that he did not wish to do as she had requested. But she got the better of him. And then she obviously grew more and more uneasy. She sat tensely, looking at one spot on the wall. But by the steady flicker of her black bonnet against the sunset outside the window I saw that she was trembling. Often as I have seen Mrs. Van Suydam since my return to New York, I shall always think of her as she was that afternoon: her bonnet trembling against the sunset and her feet curiously still. And suddenly she laughed, that aged laugh with a cracked high cackling in it. She was laughing at herself for trembling. The girl, Gertrude Cuyler, sat beside her on the sofa; and she sighed. It was the kind of sigh that sinks into the imagination as an ominous thing. The older woman took it as being personal to her as well as to the girl; the long breath that she drew was the suppression of a sigh as deep as the girl’s. They did not look at each other.