The Quicksand

I

AS Mrs. Quentin's victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park
into Fifth Avenue, she divined her son's tall figure walking ahead
of her in the twilight. His long stride covered the ground more
rapidly than usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going
home at that hour, it was because he wanted to see her.

Mrs. Quentin, though not a fanciful woman, was sometimes aware of a
sixth sense enabling her to detect the faintest vibrations of her
son's impulses. She was too shrewd to fancy herself the one mother
in possession of this faculty, but she permitted herself to think
that few could exercise it more discreetly. If she could not help
overhearing Alan's thoughts, she had the courage to keep her
discoveries to herself, the tact to take for granted nothing that
lay below the surface of their spoken intercourse: she knew that
most people would rather have their letters read than their
thoughts. For this superfeminine discretion Alan repaid her
by--being Alan. There could have been no completer reward. He was
the key to the meaning of life, the justification of what must have
seemed as incomprehensible as it was odious, had it not
all-sufficingly ended in himself. He was a perfect son, and Mrs.
Quentin had always hungered for perfection.

Her house, in a minor way, bore witness to the craving. One felt it
to be the result of a series of eliminations: there was nothing
fortuitous in its blending of line and color. The almost morbid
finish of every material detail of her life suggested the
possibility that a diversity of energies had, by some pressure of
circumstance, been forced into the channel of a narrow
dilettanteism. Mrs. Quentin's fastidiousness had, indeed, the flaw
of being too one-sided. Her friends were not always worthy of the
chairs they sat in, and she overlooked in her associates defects she
would not have tolerated in her bric-a-brac. Her house was, in fact,
never so distinguished as when it was empty; and it was at its best
in the warm fire-lit silence that now received her.

Her son, who had overtaken her on the door-step, followed her into
the drawing-room, and threw himself into an armchair near the fire,
while she laid off her furs and busied herself about the tea table.
For a while neither spoke; but glancing at him across the kettle,
his mother noticed that he sat staring at the embers with a look she
had never seen on his face, though its arrogant young outline was as
familiar to her as her own thoughts. The look extended itself to his
negligent attitude, to the droop of his long fine hands, the
dejected tilt of his head against the cushions. It was like the
moral equivalent of physical fatigue: he looked, as he himself would
have phrased it,