Shippen’s agreeable attention changed for one instant to a blank stare; then he dropped his eyes as she went on with this intimate account of what she wanted her home to be. Mother! And she had no children. The term had for him a sort of embarrassing animal significance. It was not discussed this way in polite circles, even by women who were mothers. You were supposed not to know it or to forget that this sparkling being with whom you were conversing, or maybe flirting, had passed through the experiences of an accouchement. His feelings suffered a revulsion toward her. But she held him as if she meant that he should carry away with him the dimensions, the waist measure, the countenance and the germinating biography of this house. “I told him,” she went on, still referring to the decorator, “that I wanted a home inside, where children would look as if they belonged in it, and not as if they had escaped from their own hidden quarters--soft places in it, you know, where a baby could just fall asleep, like the sofa over there,” indicating with a nod a wide, low, old-fashioned soda shrouded in shadows. He cast an embarrassed glance at it. His feelings were that a babe should be kept concealed until it was a child of an age to be decently exposed and confessed. Some men are like that, and a few women. Their parent instincts have decayed. “And when they become grown sons and daughters,” she continued, taking no notice of his discomfiture, “there should be wide, happy spaces in here for their joys--a house for lovers and weddings.” He waited. Apparently she had finished. He raised his eyes and saw her flushed, animated. “But why should you want such a house?” he asked, not that it made any difference now what she wanted. So far as he was concerned the spell of her charm was broken. His one desire was to escape this disenchantment and to find out what was in the wind for Cutter. He clung to that joke. “Because all the time I was a wife I wanted this house, and I longed for children. Now I can have them.” Shippen stood up. She remained seated, eyes lifted with that rapt look fixed upon him. “Did you say--children, Mrs. Cutter?” he stammered. “Yes; now I shall have children,” she repeated. “Well, all right; but under the circumstances, it is a little unusual; don’t you think so?” he said, the compass of his mind already pointed toward the door. “Yes, it is,” she agreed, and was evidently about to launch into this feature of the case when she saw that he was about to take his departure. This reminded her of something. “But what was it you wished to see me about, Mr. Shippen?” she asked, with a return of that vague anxiety in the tones of her voice. “Why, merely to resume a pleasant acquaintance, I suppose,” he answered politely. “Oh.” “Thank you for receiving me,” he said. “Can I do anything for you in New York?” “No,” she answered quickly, but with no shade of embarrassment to indicate that she knew he referred to her husband.