"I think father knows about it—as much as he need," she answered, her hand on the door.

"Ah, your father always knows everything," Pauline placidly acquiesced.

The prospect of the talk with her daughter–in–law barely ruffled her new–found peace. It was a pity Lita was restless; but nowadays all the young people were restless. Perhaps it would be as well to say a word to Kitty Landish; flighty and inconsequent as she was, it might open her eyes to find that she was likely to have her niece back on her hands. Mrs. Percy Landish's hands were always full to overflowing with her own difficulties. A succession of ingenious theories of life, and the relentless pursuit of originality, had landed her in a state of chronic embarrassment, pecuniary, social and sentimental. The announcement that Lita was tired of Jim, and threatened to leave him, would fall like a bombshell on that precarious roof which figured in the New York Directory as somewhere in the East Hundreds, but was recorded in the "Social Register" as No. 1 Viking Court. Mrs. Landish's last fad had been to establish herself on the banks of the East River, which she and a group of friends had adorned with a cluster of reinforced–cement bungalows, first christened El Patio, but altered to Viking Court after Mrs. Landish had read in an illustrated weekly that the Vikings, who had discovered America ages before Columbus, had not, as previously supposed, effected their first landing at Vineyard Haven, but at a spot not far from the site of her dwelling. Cement, at an early stage, is malleable, and the Alhambra motifs had hastily given way to others from the prows of Nordic ships, from silver torques and Runic inscriptions, the latter easily contrived out of Arabic sourats from the Koran. Before these new ornaments were dry, Mrs. Landish and her friends were camping on the historic spot; and after four years of occupancy they were camping still, in Mrs. Manford's sense of the word.

A hurried telephone call had assured Pauline that she could see Mrs. Landish directly after lunch; and at two o'clock her motor drove up to Viking Court, which opened on a dilapidated river–front and was cynically overlooked by tall tenement houses with an underpinning of delicatessen stores.

Mrs. Landish was nowhere to be found. She had had to go out to lunch, a melancholy maid–servant said, because the cook had just given notice; but she would doubtless soon be back. With gingerly steps Pauline entered the "living–room," so called (as visitors were unfailingly reminded) because Mrs. Landish ate, painted, modelled in clay, sculptured in wood, and received her friends there. The Vikings, she added, had lived in that way. But today all traces of these varied activities had disappeared, and the room was austerely empty. Mrs. Landish's last hobby was for what she called "purism," and her chief desire to make everything in her surroundings conform to the habits and industries of a mythical past. Ever since she had created Viking Court she had been trying to obtain rushes for the floor: but as the Eastern States of America did not produce the particular variety of rush which the Vikings were said to have used she had at last decided to have rugs woven on handlooms in Abyssinia, some one having assured her that an inscription referring to trade–relations between the Vikings and the kingdom of Prester John had been discovered in the ruins of Petra.

The difficulty of having these rugs made according to designs of the period caused the cement floor of Mrs. Landish's living–room to remain permanently bare, and most of the furniture having now been removed, the room had all the appearance of a garage, the more so as Mrs. Landish's latest protégé, a young cabaret–artist who performed on a motor–siren, had been suffered to stable his cycle in one corner.

In addition to this vehicle, the room contained only a few relentless–looking oak chairs, a long table bearing an hour–glass (for clocks would have been an anachronism), and a scrap of dusty velvet nailed on the cement wall, as to which Mrs. Landish explained that it was a bit of a sixth century Coptic vestment, and that the nuns of a Basilian convent in Thessaly were reproducing it for eventual curtains and chair–cushions. "It may take fifty years."

Mrs. Landish always added, "but I would rather go without it than live with anything less perfect."

The void into which Pauline advanced gave prominence to the figure of a man who stood with his back to her, looking through the window at what was to be a garden when Viking horticulture was revived. Meanwhile it was fully occupied by neighbouring cats and by swirls of wind–borne rubbish.

The visitor, duskily blocked against a sullen March sky, was at first not recognizable; but half way toward him Pauline exclaimed: "Dexter!" He turned, and his surprise met hers.

"I never dreamed of its being you!" she said.

He faced her with a certain defiant jauntiness. "Why not?"

"Because I never saw you here before.