For a moment Mrs. Van Suydam was speechless. Her difficulty in accepting this from Eva was plainly to be read on her face; but whatever inner unsurmountable difficulty scarred her soul I could only guess at: it might have been that of taking from Eva her own estimate of her son. She sat with her lips implacably sealed and her lids drooping over eyes that might be tell-tale, and had it not been for the spots of red on her cheekbones Eva would not have been sure that she had drawn blood; for during a period which became unbearable she said nothing. She looked straight ahead. She might have been alone in the room. When Eva, rushing to throw herself at her knees, cried: “Forgive me? Forgive me?” she still did not look at her. She might not have seen her, for all her nearness, and for all of the fact that the young woman was weeping. Eva laid her hand over her heart. She had got slowly to her feet and stood hesitating near the old lady. “I’m truly sorry I said it,” she began again to apologize. “I wish I could make you see? I don’t think that I intend doing these things. I’m impelled by some force within me. My life seems driven on by some force within me----” Because she saw that Mrs. Van Suydam’s ears were closed against her, she ceased. I realized that she wondered what to do next. But upon Mrs. Van Suydam’s lips was now a smile of polite boredom; so she might have smiled at simple-minded strangers who had forced their uninvited way to her fireside and who had not there felt at home. Eva must have acknowledged this look while she wondered at it: for how could she have bored? She began drawing away, irresolute and looking down at the small figure in the straight-backed chair. At last Mrs. Van Suydam spoke. Her tone was charged with excessive courtesy. “My dear Eva, I must ask you to leave me now. I am not so young as I once was, and tire easily. I must lie down before I go for my drive.” She held out her hand with a definite dismissal. And instantly I knew that when the door of the Van Suydam mansion should today close behind Eva it would close on all hope of a mutual comprehension. Eva must have so decided herself. “That’s that,” she concluded, during the space of time that it took us to walk around the corner and along Fifth Avenue and around another corner to the little house. “I’ve done all I can. She’s impossible.” She enumerated the many lines along which Mrs. Van Suydam was impossible. As we came in sight of the little house in Eleventh Street, she made her final effort to throw off the effects of her encounter with her mother-in-law. “I’ll go to Hollywood, for all that,” she told me, impressing upon her own spirit her invincible determination. She recalled to me a recent experience: she had told Nicholas that she had felt the rush of wings through the little house. She had said: “If I don’t listen to those wings, what’s to become of me?” Nicholas, she said, had merely raised one eyebrow.