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'I am free on Tuesday.'

'I would like you to have a talk with Percy.'

René bowed his head. Mary returned to her mother's side and thrust her face down and kissed her where the aged cheek was hollow, patting her clenched hands as they rested upon the margin of the hollow lap. As Mary moved away René accompanied her, opening the door as they reached it.

'Are you sure I can't give you a lift? Where are you dining?'

'That would get me there a little before my time,' he answered.

Mary looked back towards her mother as she left the room, fluttering a farewell towards the stationary figure, more immobile than usual. Closing the door, René went to a tray and poured himself a glass of sherry.

Alone with one another, mother and son drew closer together, like two confederates. Mary, though the nearest to them, far nearer than the other two sisters, belonged to the outside world when it came to these two, who were allied in a very special union. À deux, this extraordinary identity became apparent. To commune with one another, everyone else, even Mary, had to be excluded. René drew up a chair, talking to her softly in the language she still liked best to speak, the tongue she had spoken when she was young but which she had found it quite impossible to induce Mr. Harding senior to learn. She patted and caressed his hand, and he almost danced in his chair with pleasure, like a big dog that is caressed. He arched his legs in a rampant attitude, his toes beating for a moment a quick tattoo. Afterwards, he drank his sherry d'un trait, as though it had been a cocktail. Both their faces were broken up into deeply engraved masks of civilized irony. What he loved best about this old woman was her robust refusal to be too serious, her gnome-like raillery, her frail gaiety: the something of Voltaire, the something of Fénélon, which is secreted in all those of her race, the grimace of amusement she would wear upon her deathbed, for the same grimace would serve at need for pain. Really they had nothing to say to one another. All they required to do when they were alone was to gaze into one another's faces and smile an ancestral smile.