She owned that she had been ridiculously successful.
It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot's account. Lancelot had been
sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well and people
didn't tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard afterwards. During
the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat in New York, and
radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her now and then,
always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more automatic: she
had become a lecturing-machine.
I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had disappeared.
I asked several people about her, but life had closed over her. She had
been last heard of as lecturing--still lecturing--but no one seemed to
know when or where.
It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the
oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had
so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that had
elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of my
hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not to
have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed to set
it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a gown
that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the line of
prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.
It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the
first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I made
no excuse for following her.
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