I regarded Gertrude with a quickened interest: was love, then, such a stimulus that she was becoming perceptive? For she said now: “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Avery, for repeating it--but Mrs. Van Suydam said something else. She said that she had always fancied artists were weak creatures, and that she was now afraid that Nick was weaker than his new friends. This was what frightened her, I suspect.” But her thoughts becoming confused, she gave her little gasp and started again. “She said that in Eva’s friends she seemed to have discovered a toughness of fibre, a tenacity of aim, and the will to succeed. This was what frightened her, I think,” she wound up. Anthony Bloodgood was surprised. He expostulated with Gertrude: “I didn’t know she felt that way about that bounder Mapes. How could he affect her? It seemed to me that it was Eva who knocked her breath out. I remember I came up and told her that Nick was coming. I explained that he hadn’t known she was there because he was talking to Eva Litchfield. And she looked dashed, to me. I mean, the name, Eva Litchfield, seemed to do something to her. I give you my word, she almost jumped!” They disputed above my head, leaving me free to do the thing that all along I had known I would do: I began attributing to Mrs. Van Suydam those reactions that she should have felt and that I was sure she had felt in the depths of her bosom so decently restricted by its buckram and black silk. The name, Eva Litchfield, tolling in her head when the young man had ceased speaking, must have drawn together into a design all her premonitions of disaster. This triumphant name took possession of her imagination, seemed, at once, to become part of her life because it menaced her son. So strong must this feeling have been--so swayed by it must she instantly have become--that the garish reception rooms might have darkened. I was sure that she felt old, and helpless, in face of this victorious name. She must have closed her eyes, in her temporary weakness, before opening them to gaze profoundly at her son. In my game of visualizing this fragmentary story, I said to myself: What a gorgeous scene! In her son’s bright blue eyes she must have seen what she had always seen in their sparkling depths, belief that life would be good to him. Sure that his mother adored him--sure that the girl walking beside him was the most exquisite creature in the world--convinced, as every man has been convinced at one time, that the two women he loved would love each other--Nicholas must almost have hurried in his eagerness to bring them together. But his mother’s mind, leaping beyond this appeal, fastened upon Spencer Mapes’ looming fixed regard. She sat, therefore, upon her sofa composed to all outward seeming, smiling at her son and his companion and meeting the eyes of neither; for she was engaged in her duel with Spencer Mapes.