The boy was, Linda acknowledged, more than commonly dependable and able. He was heavy, like his father, and so diffident that he almost stuttered; but his mental processes flashed in quick intuitive perceptions. Lowrie was an easy and brilliant student; and, perhaps because of this, of his mental certainty, he was not intimate with her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and unsympathetic critic of humanity. Even now, so soon, there was no question of his success in the law his fitness had elected. The springs of his being were purely intellectual, reasoning. In him Linda saw magnified her own coldness; and, turned on herself, she viewed it with an arbitrary feminine resentment. He was actually courteous to her; but under all their intercourse there was a perceptible impatience. His scorn of other women, girls, however, was openly expressed and honest; it had no trace of the mere affectation of pessimism natural to his age. Arnaud, less thoughtful than she, was vastly entertained by this, and drew Lowrie out in countless sly sallies and contradictions. Yes, he would succeed, but, after all, what would his success be worth--placed, that was, against Vigné's radiant happiness, Bailey Sandby's quiet eyes and the quality of his return home each evening? Her thoughts came back to Pleydon--she had before her a New York paper describing the ceremony of unveiling his Simon Downige at Hesperia. There was a long learned article praising its beauty and emphasizing Pleydon's eminence. He was, it proceeded, an anomaly in an age of momentary experimental talents--a humanized Greek force. He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave her an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points of contact. She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda had the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling mist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, the solid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw from the paper, further, that the Downige who had commissioned the monument was dead. XXXVI In the middle of the festive period that connected Christmas with the new year Arnaud turned animatedly from his breakfast scanning of the news. “It seems,” he told her, “that a big rumpus has developed in Hesperia over the Pleydon statue--the present Downige omnipotence, never friendly with our old gentleman, has condemned its bronze founder. You know what I mean. It's an insult to their pride, their money and position, to see him perpetuated as a tramp. On the contrary he was a very respectable individual from a prominent family and town.