The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what could a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon and an interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized meal at Plon’s; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the stunted box-trees afterward had been--well, impossible. They had got to the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter didn’t bear him any grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face her first before a witness. By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally, appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden superstition was genuine; so genuine that he found himself resenting a bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of the chatterers. Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room, at her own hotel--whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he knew nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually docked at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay, too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as much as she did him. He had owned--or pretended?--to Marty Martin a furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never seen, of whom he hadn’t so much as a photograph. Now something quite different stirred within him: the instinct to protect her against anything she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and overwrought and quite old--pathetically, not ironically, like the little old lady who had hobbled past the door--and he resented any detail that might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure she would hate this other woman’s being there--the younger woman who had just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.