Neale looked at her back with some uneasiness. He felt his privacy threatened, and, stiffening, put up the bars. And apparently Mother sensed the change, for she at once dropped her intimate tone and began making gay plans for "having some fun" during her stay, plans in which dental engagements played a conspicuously small part. It turned out to be a very light-hearted month, Mother's month in the dentist's chair. Neale and Martha were quite shaken up out of the quiet, jog-trot routine of their peaceful days and long evenings of serious reading together. Mother took them to the theater and to dinner at out-of-the-way restaurants of which, like most sober resident New Yorkers, they had never heard the names. In the daytime, she and Martha, of whom she had grown very fond, went around a good deal together, looking at the innumerable expensive and occasionally beautiful objects on view in the shops of a big city; or visiting museums, or going to matinees. They heard a good deal of music, all three of them. Mother had chosen a hotel near Carnegie Hall, so that frequently, when they had nothing else to do, they strolled up on foot and listened to whatever was being played. They had an occasional dinner with Professor Wentworth and Martha in their apartment on 122d Street, and Mother went off by herself to look up the old friends of Union Hill days, the few who were not scattered. Once in a while Neale talked over his business prospects with Mother when she asked him about them and he couldn't get out of it, and they agreed that he would be able to marry in another year. And having agreed in this opinion, Mother was apt to fall very silent for a time. But this suited Neale, who found intimate personal talk disconcerting. It always made him uneasy when another human being rattled the handle of the door to his inner secret garden. One of the things he most loved in Martha was that she took so much for granted without talking about it. They understood each other instinctively, he felt, without need of explanation. He suspected that Martha had her own inner garden, and prided himself on respecting her right to it. _He_ was no one to go rattling handles of doors that were none of his. He found Martha especially restful and satisfying after one of these talks with Mother, lightly and passingly as Mother glanced over those sensitive places. He constantly felt that Mother was trying to open a door he wished to keep shut, that she was trying to say something that he had no desire to hear. He and Martha were all right. What business had Mother to look at them that way? She did nothing after all, beyond looking, and went away at the end of her month, having committed no greater crime than to whisper brokenly to Neale as she kissed him good-by, "Neale, it's not enough to--Neale, you must _love_ Martha. You must _love_ her--not just--" At this Neale had quickly assumed the cold look of distaste which she knew so well, and she had ventured no further.