It was a greater pleasure for the reason that, ever since receiving his father’s amazing cablegram, the vague antagonism he had felt for two or three years toward his parents had given place to affection and gratitude. They had seemingly come round after all to acknowledging his right to be himself. The concession gave him a sense of loving them, of loving the things that belonged to them. He strolled into their rooms, looking about on the objects they used, as though in this way he got some contact with their personalities. As yet, Jennie’s family hardly entered the sphere of his conceptions. He knew she had a mother and sisters; he had seen and spoken to Teddy at the bank. But even the knowledge that the boy was in jail for killing a man didn’t bring him or them near to him as realities. While there were things he should do for the boy, they would not be done for him, but for Jennie. What concerned her naturally concerned her husband; but otherwise his father and mother came first. For this new generosity on their part, for this opening of the arms, his heart glowed toward them, making them sensibly his own. He was thinking of this as he stood in his mother’s room, gazing round on the chintzy comfort he had all his life regarded with some awe. Not since he had been a little boy had he felt so warmly toward her as now. A note from her at Quarantine had assured him, as she had assured him before he went to South America, that she was his mother and that in all trials he could count on her. Counting on her, he could count on everything, for however difficult his father might prove, she could manage him in the end. It made everything easier for him and for Jennie, turning an anxious outlook on life into a splendid hopefulness. He was leaving the room to go and see if Mrs. Gull had cooked a chop for him when he noticed, propped against the wall and near the door by which he had come in, what looked like a picture carelessly covered with a crimson cloth. His mother had long talked of having her portrait done; he wondered if it could be that. He put his hand on it, and felt the frame. It was a picture, and, if a picture, undoubtedly the portrait. "Let’s see what the old lady looks like," were the words that passed through his mind. With a twitch the cloth was off, and he sprang back. The start was one of surprise. Looking for no more than the exquisite conventionality he knew so well, this vital nudity caught his breath and made his heart leap. It was as if he had actually come on some living pagan loveliness seated in one of the empty rooms. Tannhäuser first beholding the goddess in the secrecy of the Venusberg must have felt something like this amazed tumult of the senses. Turning from the great bay window in which he had hastily pulled up the shades, his excitement had consciously in it a presentiment of evil. She was so alive, and so much there on purpose!