I asked if I might not find her a seat. She refused with determination; and I realized that she feared she might not be able to go on with the day if for a moment she slid into dependency. She stood rigidly upright, holding to the barrier with her gloved hands. Only with the backing of her spirit could she get through something lying dead ahead. We stood side by side, divided by our memories. The sparks struck from the pavement by the hoofs of her bays, on her coming drive home with her son restored to her single-minded purpose, would be the sparks of the triumph that had lain in wait in her decorous breast so tightly buttoned into its absurd costume. This single-minded purpose might have directly derived from her old house, from its portraits, its family silver, its furniture that had never been neglected. I fancied that I heard the flap of the page which she, with determination, turned. Nicholas, the harvest of his soul’s wild oats garnered, would return; and, preparing for his return, his mother pieced together in her mind the things that had taken place: things she had seen, things she had been told and things she had through her motherhood divined--the mistakes of others and her own aloof waiting. But even now, before his landing, a faint uneasiness had evidently dropped down into her complacent knowledge that once more she was to have him safely under her wing. The tautness of her spare body showed at once that she suspected, and denied the suspicion, that they could never return to their old-time serenity. The most they could hope for was to shut, with the door of their house, the door through which they had ventured forth to play their part in the present life of New York. And New York as we knew it, by invading her home, must have begun to seem dreadful to her. I wondered if, with even her conviction of right, she could bear to look at her son on the drive downtown: for they would eventually reach the intersection of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue. Would she know, without glancing at him, that he had turned his head, with the fixity of a purpose to last him through life, that he might look east? I might have been invisibly in the brougham with them: for distinctly I saw the policeman hold up his gloved hand. Almost rising, triumphantly, on the box-seat, Higginson would give the impression that it required strength to hold in his horses. And, refusing to recognize the traffic lights, Mrs. Van Suydam would lift the speaking-trumpet to her controlled lips and direct: “Drive on!”