After that, the dying was a matter of hours and great pain. Had she come to her in silence, the tired spirit would have lifted easily. So Paula learned, by terrible experience, the inexpressible value of silence in a room with death. She had been very close to the mystery. Holding her mother's hand and praying inaudibly at the last, she had felt the final wrench to the very core of her being.... Departure, indeed; Paula was never conscious of her mother's spirit afterward. It is probably futile to inquire if a child of one's flesh is invariably one's spiritual offspring.... An ineffectual girl, the mother became a hopeless woman. In the interval, out of the grinding of her forces, was produced a fervent heat.... Did blind negative suffering make her receptive to a gifted child, or did Paula's mother merely give, from her own lovely flesh, a garment for a spirit-alien from a far and shining country? * * * * * Three or four mornings after the Charter critique, Paula brought further work down-town. Reifferscheid swung about in his chair and stared at her fully thirty seconds. Then he spoke brusquely, possibly to hide his embarrassment: "Take these three books home, but don't bother with them to-day. I want you back here at four o'clock. You are to go out to supper with me." The idea was not exactly pleasant. She had seen Reifferscheid only a few times apart from his desk, where she liked him without reservation. She had always pictured him as a club-man--a typically successful New Yorker, with a glitter of satire and irreverent humor about all his sayings. The thought of a supper with Reifferscheid had a bit of supper heaviness about it. The club type she preferred to know from a sort of middle distance.... "Won't you, please?" His change of manner was effective. All brusqueness was gone. Paula saw his real earnestness, and the boyish effort of its expression. There was no reason for her to refuse, and she hesitated no longer. Yet she wondered why he had asked her, and searched her mind to learn why she could not see him at leisure, apart from a club-window's leather chair; at some particular table in a grill or buffet, or enlivening a game of billiards with his inimitable characterizations. One of the finest and most effective minds she had ever contacted belonged to this editor. His desk was the symbol to her of concentrated and full-pressure strenuousness; in his work was all that was sophisticated and world-weathered, but she could neither explain nor overcome the conviction that his excellence was in spite of, rather than the result of his life outside.... She met him on the stroke of four in the entrance to _The States_ building, and he led the way at once to South Ferry, where they took the Staten Island boat. She felt that he was not at ease in the crowds, but it was a fact, also, that he did not appear so huge and froggy in the street, as in the crowded office she knew so well.