Her dry cheeks flushed an angry red. With her deep resentment of a mother, she almost hurled her words in my face: “How despicably cruel!” Through her frail body there now surged such energy in defense of her son that she might have been rushing at me with upraised fist. “How calculatingly cruel you can be, Mrs. Avery!” She closed her eyes: it might have been to recover her self-control, and it might have been that she refused to longer see me. “You force me to tell you something that I had never thought to let pass my lips.” And her eternal hatred of me because I forced her to tell it stared through her blazing eyes. She had gone to the little house in Eleventh Street, running through the night because death had arrived before her. She had understood, from the message, that her son had hesitated to throw upon his mother’s age the burden of those details immediately following death, and that she had only been notified when she could enter on a scene of that dignity arranged by man to cover the careless arrangement of nature. Transfixed in the door of Eva’s room, she witnessed the scene on which she had sealed her lips and to which she had vainly tried to shut the eyes of her memory. And again, saying this, she darted at me her look of a terrible resentment. Not daring to withdraw lest her son realize that by the accident of her haste he had been overheard in his last appeal to his wife, Mrs. Van Suydam had then experienced the complete agony. For, before her shrinking eyes, her son came across the floor and took the dead girl in his desperate arms. Mrs. Van Suydam said to me: “I am telling you this to show you that my son loved his wife. You can never after this suspect him of an indifference that might have caused her to wish to die.” Her soul had called for help to bear it. She listened, because she could not move, as Nicholas accused some Great Juggler of having shuffled the cards. He had said: “Eva, you’ve always been so cold. I’ve never believed that you’d yielded yourself to me body and soul. Won’t you soften just once, and leave me that to remember?” I had hurt her, deliberately, through the one profound instinct of a woman’s life, her child. An appalling disintegration began, running through her, turning her blood to water, I thought as I watched the resentment drain from her cheeks. She seemed to be shaking to pieces. She said under her breath--and I knew she did not speak to me: “Why is everything good dying before my eyes?” She held tightly to the rail while she gathered her forces. I faltered: “I’m very sorry I asked.”