The last person in the family group to be remarked is the mother. She sat at the end of the long table, dispensing tea and coffee with an air of weary assiduity. In her youth she had had some claim to beauty, and there still clung to her a kind of tired elegance. Her hair, once blond, had become almost white, and lay in rippled fullness over a forehead much lined. Her face was without colour, the eyebrows dark and beautifully curved, the eyes gray and clear, with a certain startled expression, as if life had presented to her little else than a series of unforeseen surprises. She was a very silent woman; silence was her dominating quality, but it was enigmatic silence. Persons of effusive and flamboyant manners found her silence scarcely distinguishable from scorn; people of vivacious temperament called it stolidity; the general impression among her acquaintance was that it was significant of a nature at once cold and colourless. They were all wrong, however. And those were yet further from the truth who confused her silence with placidity. There were times when a sudden flash of fire in the gray, watchful eyes witnessed to an inner heat. If she spoke little, it was not because she felt little--it was rather because she realised the total ineffectiveness of language to express her thought. Helen had characteristically never tried to understand her mother. But as Arthur had grown older, and especially since his return from Oxford, he had often found himself speculating on the real nature of his mother's character. He saw her, an apparent automaton, content to fill an automatic place in life, making no claims for herself, offering no opposition to the claims of others, apparently desirous of squeezing herself into a position of neglected insignificance; but he was acute enough to know that all this self-effacement was artificial. What were her real relations with his father? Was she a woman simply overborne by his superior weight? How much of her silence sprang from fear of his heavy-handed judgments? But no sooner did such thoughts visit him than the boy recoiled from them with a sense of their indelicacy. Not to speculate at times upon the relations of his parents was impossible in one who was just at that stage of observation when the entire area of life is an object of intense curiosity; but to cherish or pursue such thoughts was too much like violating a privacy which both nature and custom had declared sacred. Yet of one thing he was sure: his mother's native force of character was not inferior to his father's, and her silence rested on a deep-lying intensity of temperament, not on apathy.