“I shall keep awake, if you’re coming.” “All right. Say good night to your mother, and tell her I’ve sent you to bed.” “But you haven’t,” said Dennis. “No, but that’ll make her pleased with me.” Dennis stole out, and Blanche gave a sigh of relief. “That’s a good thing,” she said. “Dennis was as much out of place here, as I should be playing football with him at Eton.” “But you’d enjoy that,” said Colin. “You’d love being the one female in a crowd of handsome boys.” She laughed. “Yes, my dear, we all detest competition as we get older. But why did you let Dennis come at all? Either he’d wallow in it, which would be extremely bad for him, or he’d be bored with it.” “I wanted to see which he would do. It would have been very interesting if he’d wallowed in it.” “You’re no judge of character. You might have known he wouldn’t,” she said. “Oh, do you think that children of that age have character? Aren’t they more like white sheets of paper, ready to be written on?” “Colin, you’re an awful father! Fancy wanting this delicious, witty piece of muck to be written in poor Dennis’s first chapter! I’m glad he’s gone. I shall be able to enjoy it with a freer conscience. Oh, observe your Aunt Hester! She looks as if she was receiving early impressions, and finding them wonderfully agreeable. And, oh, look at your much revered grandmother! Did you ever see anyone so monumental?” There she sat in the centre of the room, in a great chair of rose-coloured Genoese velvet. In this interval between the acts, the cut-glass chandelier over her head had been lit, and the blaze strongly illuminated that alabaster face, motionless, expressionless, inscrutable. And yet what sculptor’s skill could have wrought a countenance from which every sign of feeling or even of consciousness was so expunged? In a face of stone some expression lurks in the sightless eyes and the shadows at the corners of the mouth, and an attentive observer will seem to see the expression change, and discover some fresh hint of what the sculptor divined in his living model and chiselled into the lifeless stone. But here there was no such elasticity of interpretation possible. The closer you looked, the more you were baffled. And yet there was no tranquillity there as on the face of the dead. Lady Yardley’s face was immensely alive, but with _what_ was it alive? “Talk of white paper....” said Blanche. Colin laughed. “Not a bit of it. Covered with strange writing,” he said. “Look!” He leaned forward. “Granny dear,” he called. She turned her head in the direction of his voice. Then came recognition, for the blank eyes brightened and the folded lips uncurled. There was Something there: it was as if Colin had caused characters written in invisible ink to spring up over the blank surface. But they faded again before they could be read, and presently she turned back and looked up the curtain in front of the stage, where the footlights were just rekindled.