"Not very much. I was thinking how neither poor Herb nor Cousin Trent fits the picture very well--it doesn't matter. There's more than one way to pour poison in the ear of a king. You did it with words, millions of little nibbling words, all the years he lived with you and--and for a final dirty joke of the fates, begot me--but I think he knew I loved him, as much as a child's capable of loving, maybe it gave him something, after all he couldn't see ahead. And I was thinking: I must write to Aunt Cora, I think she'd remember the crazy brat who adored her and then couldn't come to see her any more, because Tom Winwood d-r-rinks! She might have some of his work, and might send me to friends of his, people you never knew. I was thinking, Mother, how differently you'd feel if his work could be recognized, now that he's been safely dead for twelve years. What a change! Then you'd be--what, his inspiration?" "Callista, don't! Stop it! Do you have to break my heart completely? What have I done?" "'Such an act'--oh, poor Mother, nothing, nothing at all. Maybe that's the worst of it. You've done nothing, just lived inside the shell of your own vanity--as everyone does, I suppose. I'm sorry, Mother. It's all right, I'm going, and I won't come back. My own vanity tricked me into saying too much, but you'll forget, and go on in your own way. I haven't changed anything. 'Assume a virtue if you have it not'--remember? 'Forgive me this my virtue, for in the fatness of these pursy times'--you don't have one little scrap, a three-line scrawl on the back of an envelope?" Callista's mother, weeping with her head on her arms, did not answer that. To Callista, standing in the doorway not yet able to turn and go, it seemed as though all hatred and resentment had drained away suddenly from within her; including the old dark aching hatred for herself, which until then had seldom released her except at certain times in the warm presence of Edith Nolan. She would have liked to cross the room, try for some physical contact implying comfort and forgiveness with that stranger over there who still made strangled sounds of self-pity and other kinds of pain, all of them real. But having no confidence in her skill at such gestures, no illusion that a relation thus broken could ever be repaired, and fearing to lose the new-found inner quiet, Callista only said: "Good night, Mother." Downstairs then, pausing on the landing, her hand tightening on the rail as she waited on the passing of a curious nausea. Too early for the sickness of pregnancy, wasn't it? Nothing else wrong, and the nausea did pass. "_My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time._"