It came to me indeed as I stood on her door-step that as she had a son she might not after all be so lone; yet I remembered at the same time that Jasper Nettlepoint was not quite a young man to lean upon, having—as I at least supposed—a life of his own and tastes and habits which had long since diverted him from the maternal side. If he did happen just now to be at home my solicitude would of course seem officious; for in his many wanderings—I believed he had roamed all over the globe—he would certainly have learned how to manage. None the less, in fine, I was very glad to show Mrs. Nettlepoint I thought of her. With my long absence I had lost sight of her; but I had liked her of old, she had been a good friend to my sisters, and I had in regard to her that sense which is pleasant to those who in general have gone astray or got detached, the sense that she at least knew all about me. I could trust her at any time to tell people I was respectable. Perhaps I was conscious of how little I deserved this indulgence when it came over me that I hadn’t been near her for ages. The measure of that neglect was given by my vagueness of mind about Jasper. However, I really belonged nowadays to a different generation; I was more the mother’s contemporary than the son’s. Mrs. Nettlepoint was at home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where the wide windows opened to the water. The room was dusky—it was too hot for lamps—and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing on the loved ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren; but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me, pointing with her fan to the Back Bay: “I shall see nothing more charming than that over there, you know!” She made me very welcome, but her son had told her about the _Patagonia_, for which she was sorry, as this would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature in any boat and mainly confined to her cabin even in weather extravagantly termed fine—as if any weather could be fine at sea. “Ah then your son’s going with you?” I asked. “Here he comes, he’ll tell you for himself much better than I can pretend to.” Jasper Nettlepoint at that moment joined us, dressed in white flannel and carrying a large fan. “Well, my dear, have you decided?” his mother continued with no scant irony. “He hasn’t yet made up his mind, and we sail at ten o’clock!” “What does it matter when my things are put up?” the young man said. “There’s no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I’m waiting for a telegram—that will settle it. I just walked up to the club to see if it was come—they’ll send it there because they suppose this house unoccupied. Not yet, but I shall go back in twenty minutes.”