The door opened, a girl looked for a moment into the street, he passed inside. Having stumbled up the dark stairs, pushed back their private entrance, hung up his coat in the little hall, with a deliberate effort he shook off the suspicions that had, during the last moments, troubled him and prepared to meet his mother and sister. Because he had a happy, easy and affectionate temperament absence always gilded his friends with gifts and qualities that their presence only too often denied. His years abroad had given him a picture of his mother and sister that the few weeks of his return had already dimmed and obscured. His mother's weekly letters had, during ten long years, built up an image of her as the dearest old lady in the world. He had always, since a child, seen her in a detached way--his deep and permanent relations had been with his father--but those letters, of which he had now a deep and carefully cherished pile, gave him a most charming picture of her. They had not been clever nor deep nor indeed very interesting, but they had been affectionate and tender with all the gentleness of the figure that he remembered sitting in its lace cap beside the fire. After three weeks of home life he was compelled to confess that he did not in the least understand his mother. His intuitions about people were not in fact of a very penetrating character. His mother appeared to all her world as a "sweet old lady," but even Martin could already perceive that was not in the least what she really was. He had seen her old hands tremble with suppressed temper on the very day after his arrival; he had seen her old lips white with anger because the maid had brought her the wrong shawl. Old ladies must of course have their fancies, but his mother had some fixed and fierce purpose in her life that was quite beyond his powers of penetration. It might of course have something to do with her attachment to his father. Attached Martin could see that she was, but at the same time completely and eternally outside her husband's spiritual life. That might have been perhaps in the first place by her own desire--she did not want "to be bothered with all that nonsense." But certainly all these years with him had worked upon her: she was not perhaps so sure now that it was all "nonsense." She wanted, it might be, a closer alliance with him, which she could not have because she had once rejected the chance of it. Martin did not know; he was aware that there was a great deal going on in the house that he did not fathom. Amy, his sister, knew. There was an alliance between his mother and his sister deep and strong, as he could see--he did not yet know that it was founded very largely on dislike and fear of himself.