The Englishman murmured that he intended making a virtue of his necessity to know more of her. He approached the elderly lady and enquired if there were something he could do for her. He was a huge man with a kind pink-and-white face and a gasping voice. Her own voice, when she replied, was dry as bone-dust, but she stated, graciously enough, that she recognized him by his pictures. Severely she added that she had thought the reception was given to him. And her somewhat acrid amusement, when he replied that so he had been given to understand, proved that her fear was not of the guests now hovering near. She said: “I came to get my son.” There was finality about her announcement. In the same tone she might have said “I came to snatch my son from hell fire.” “Your son, then, is a writer?” the Englishman ventured. Her figure tightened: it was impossible for her to draw herself up; so far as one could see, she had drawn herself up at birth and never let go. “We have no artists in our family,” she gave him back. She remarked that she was Mrs. Schuyler Van Suydam, and added more kindly: “My son is by way of being an architect. Possibly, in England also, you permit your sons to play before they settle down?” She had disposed of the question of how she came to be there and was done with him. She swept the room with her disapproval, and turned her chilling regard back to the Englishman and disapproved of him. In spite of the alleged paucity of such stuff in her family, she was a great pantomime artist. She sat on her sofa--squarely in the middle as if to defy an author to sit beside her. But I saw that her throat was convulsed. Her eyes were bleak with more than her aversion to her surroundings. The Englishman indulged in his soundless laughter. Throughout an attack of this mirth, he might be without emotion of any sort, so expressionless would be his face; it might be a physical instead of a mental spasm. He swallowed every second word of his reply, and on the resulting incoherence took himself off. He again mentioned his old aunt to us. He became so amused at the recollection that he gasped himself out of telling more. The old aunt remained in our memory as one who could well have been what is called a character. One had, always, to supplement what the Englishman recounted.