be caught and held in bigger hands, intensely. Hands to reach out in pretty supplication and to close tight like little white bars across what was given. . . . Her age was problematical. It seemed to vary with her gowns, with her moods, with her companions, until it ran the whole scale of the years between twenty-five and forty-five. What it actually was Jock never knew. Once, long ago, he had asked, and Madelaine Hamill had answered him almost savagely, "I have forgotten. On purpose." This served to whet his curiosity, so that thereafter he watched and wondered, and came in time to the confusing realization that his mother was young with men, middle-aged with women, and old when she was alone.
Jock sat down as she had directed, greeting the three men each in turn. They were frequent visitors to the house and he knew them all well—Saunders Lincoln, of the iron-gray hair and the still-athletic figure, so particularly well that he had called him "Uncle Link" and received from him rather breath-taking checks at Christmas almost ever since he could remember. "Uncle" was here merely a term of familiarity, however; Saunders Lincoln was not a relative. "Why don't you marry him?" Jock had demanded of his mother on a former occasion, and had learned that he was already married to, and separated from, a woman who, on account of her religion, would not agree to a divorce.
"Marriage," Mrs. Hamill had added, "is a mistake for one of my temperament, anyhow. I'm too fond of men in general." Which was quite true. Her Utopia was a world peopled solely by men, with herself a gorgeous goddess before whom all did obeisance—not too impersonally. She could not bear women and women, of course, could not bear her. She made young
