# The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave/The Wheel of Time/Chapter 3

III
After luncheon at the Crisfords'—the big Sunday banquets of twenty people and a dozen courses—the men, lingering a little in the dining-room, dawdling among displaced chairs and dropped napkins, while the ladies rustled away, ended by shuffling in casual pairs up to the studio, where coffee was served, and where, presently, before the cigarettes were smoked out, Mrs. Crisford always reappeared to usher in her contingent. The studio was high and handsome, and luncheon at the Crisfords' was, in the common esteem, more amusing than almost anything else in London except dinner. It was Bohemia with excellent service— ​Bohemia not debtor but creditor. Up-stairs the pictures, finished or nearly finished, and arranged in a shining row, gave an obviousness of topic, so that conversation could easily touch bottom. Maurice Glanvil, who had never been in the house before, looked about and wondered; he was struck with the march of civilization—the rise of the social tide. There were new notes in English life, which he caught quickly with his fresh sense; during his long absence—twenty years of France and Italy—all sorts of things had happened. In his youth, in England, artists and authors and actors—people of that general kind—were not nearly so "smart." Maurice Glanvil was forty-nine to-day, and he thought a great deal of his youth. He regretted it, he missed it, he tried to beckon it back; but the differences in London made him feel that it had gone forever. There might perhaps be some sudden compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view from the brow of the hill; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which probably would make one pompous, make one think one's self ​venerable. Meanwhile, at any rate, it was odious to be forty-nine. Maurice observed the young now more than he had ever done; observed them, that is, as the young. He wished he could have had a son, to be twenty with again; his daughter was only eighteen; but fond as he was of her, he couldn't live instinctively into her girlishness. It was not that there was not plenty of it, for she was simple, sweet, indefinite, without the gifts that the boy would have had, the gifts—what had become of them now?—that he himself used to have.
The youngest person present, before the ladies came in, was the young man who had sat next to Vera, and whom, being on the same side of the long table, he had not had under his eye. Maurice noticed him now, noticed that he was very good-looking, fair and fresh and clean, impeccable in his straight smoothness; also that, apparently knowing none of the other guests and moving by himself about the studio with visible interest in the charming things, he had the modesty of his age and of his position. He had, however, something more besides, which had begun ​to prompt this observer to speak to him in order to hear the sound of his voice—a strange, elusive resemblance, lost in the profile, but flickering straight out of the full face, to some one Maurice had known. For a minute Glanvil was worried by it—he had a sense that a name would suddenly come to him if he should see the lips in motion; but as he was on the point of laying the ghost by an experiment Mrs. Crisford led in her companions. His daughter was among them, and in company, as he was constantly anxious about her appearance and her attitude, she had at moments the faculty of drawing his attention from everything else. The poor child, the only fruit of his odd, romantic union, the coup de foudre of his youth, with her strangely beautiful mother, whose own mother had been a Russian, and who had died in giving birth to her—his short, colorless, insignificant Vera was excessively, incorrigibly plain. She had been the disappointment of his life, but he greatly pitied her. Her want of beauty, with her antecedents, had been one of the strangest tricks of fate; she was acutely ​conscious of it, and being good and docile, would have liked to please. She did sometimes, to her father's delight, in spite of everything; she had been educated abroad, on foreign lines, near her mother's people. He had brought her to England to take her out, to do what he could for her; but he was not unaware that in England her manners, which had been thought very pretty on the Continent, would strike some persons as artificial. They were exactly what her mother's had been; they made up to a certain extent for the want of other resemblance. An extreme solicitude, at any rate, as to the impression they might make, was the source of his habit, in London, of watching her covertly. He tried to see at a given moment how she looked, if she were happy; it was always with an intention of encouragement, and there was a frequent exchange between them of little invisible affectionate signs. She wore charming clothes, but she was terribly short; in England the girls were gigantic, and it was only the tallest who were noticed. Their manners, alas, had nothing to do with it—many of them ​indeed hadn't any manners. As soon as he had got near Vera he said to her, scanning her through his single glass from head to foot:
"Who is the young man who sat next you? the one at the other end of the room."
"I don't know his name, papa—I didn't catch it."
"Was he civil—did he talk to you?"
"Oh, a great deal, papa—about all sorts of things."
Something in the tone of her voice made him look with greater intensity and even with greater tenderness than usual into her little dim green eyes.
"Then you're all right—you're getting on?"
She gave her effusive smile—the one that perhaps wouldn't do in England. "Oh, beautifully, papa—every one's so kind."
She never complained, was a brave little optimist, full of sweet resources; but he had detected to-day, as soon as he looked at her, the particular shade of her content. It made him continue, after an hesitation: "He didn't say anything about his relations—anything that could give you a clew?"
​Vera thought a moment. "Not that I can remember—unless that Mr. Crisford is painting the portrait of his mother. Ah, there it is!" the girl exclaimed, looking across the room at a large picture on an easel, which the young man had just approached, and from which their host had removed the drapery that covered it. Maurice Glanvil had observed this drapery, and as the artist unveiled the canvas with a flourish he saw that he had been waiting for the ladies to show it, to produce a surprise, a grand effect. Every one moved towards it, and Maurice, with his daughter beside him, recognized that the production, a portrait, was striking, a great success for Crisford—the figure, down to the knees, with an extraordinary look of life, of a tall, handsome woman of middle age, in full dress, in black. Yet he saw it for the moment vaguely, through a preoccupation, that of a discovery which he had just made, and which had recalled to him an incident of his youth—his juxtaposition, in London, at a dinner, to a girl, insurmountably charmless to him, who had fallen in love with him (so that she was ​nearly to die of it), within the first five minutes, before he had even spoken; as he had subsequently learned from a communication made him by his poor mother—a reminder uttered with a pointless bitterness that he had failed to understand, and accompanied with unsuspected details, much later—too late, long after his marriage and shortly before her death. He said to himself that he must look out, and he wondered if poor Vera would also be insurmountably charmless to the good-looking young man. "But what a likeness, papa—what a likeness!" he heard her murmur at his elbow with suppressed excitement.
"How can you tell, my dear, if you haven't seen her?"
"I mean to the gentleman—the son."
Every one was exclaiming, "How wonderfully clever—how beautiful!" and under cover of the agitation and applause Maurice Glanvil had drawn nearer the picture. The movement had brought him close to the young man of whom he had been talking with Vera, and who, with his happy eyes on the painted figure, seemed to smile in ​acknowledgment of the artist's talent and of the sitter's charm.
"Do you know who the lady is?" Maurice said to him.
He turned his bright face to his interlocutor. "She's my mother—Mrs. Tregent. Isn't it wonderful?"
His eyes, his lips, his voice flashed a light into Glanvil's uncertainty—the tormenting resemblance was simply a prolonged echo of Fanny Knocker, in whose later name, precisely, he recognized the name pronounced by the young man. Maurice Glanvil stared in some bewilderment; this stately, splendid lady, with a face so vivid that it was handsome, was what that unfortunate girl had become? The eyes, as if they picked him out, looked at him strangely from the canvas; the face, with all its difference, asserted itself, and he felt himself turning as red as if he had been in the presence of the original. Young Tregent, pleased and proud, had given way to the pressing spectators, placing himself at Vera's other side; and Maurice heard the girl exclaim to him, in one of her pretty effusions: ​"How beautiful she must be, and how amiable!"
"She is indeed—It's not a bit flattered."
And while Maurice still stared, more and more mystified—for "flattered, flattered!" was the unspoken solution in which he had instantly taken refuge—his neighbor continued: "I wish you could know her—you must; she's delightful. She couldn't come here to-day—they asked her; she has people lunching at home."
"I should be so glad; perhaps we may meet her somewhere," said Vera.
"If I ask her, and if you'll let her, I'm sure she'll come to see you," the young man responded. Maurice had glanced at him while the face of the portrait watched them with the oddest, the grimmest effect. He was filled with a confusion of feelings, asking himself half a dozen questions at once. Was young Tregent, with his attentive manner, "making up" to Vera? was he going out of his way in answering for his mother's civility? Little did he know what he was taking on himself! Above all, was Fanny Knocker to-day this extraordinary figure— ​extraordinary in the light of the early plainness that had made him bolt? He became conscious of an extreme curiosity, an irresistible desire to see her.
"Oh, papa," said Vera, "Mr. Tregent's so kind; he's so good as to promise us a visit from his mother."
The young man's friendly eyes were still on the child's face. "I'll tell her all about you. Oh, if I ask her, she'll come!" he repeated.
"Does she do everything you ask her?" the girl inquired.
"She likes to know my friends!"
Maurice hesitated, wondering if he were in the presence of a smooth young humbug to whom compliments cost nothing, or in that of an impression really made—made by his little, fluttered, unpopular Vera. He had a horror of exposing his child to risks, but his curiosity was greater than his caution. "Your mother mustn't come to us—it's our duty to go to her," he said to Mr. Tregent; "I had the honor of knowing her—a long time ago. Her mother and mine were intimate friends. Be so good as to ​mention my name to her, that of Maurice Glanvil, and to tell her how glad I have been to make your acquaintance. And now, my dear child," he added, to Vera, "we must take leave."
During the rest of that day it never occurred to him that there might be an awkwardness in his presenting himself, even after many years, before a person with whom he had broken as he had broken with Fanny Knocker. This was partly because he held, justly enough, that he had never committed himself, and partly because the intensity of his desire to measure with his own eyes the change represented—misrepresented perhaps—by the picture was a force greater than any embarrassment. His mother had told him that the poor girl had cruelly suffered, but there was no present intensity in that idea. With her expensive portrait, her grand air, her handsome son, she somehow embodied success, whereas he himself, standing for mere bereavement and disappointment, was a failure not to be surpassed. With Vera that evening he was very silent; she saw him smoke endless cigarettes, and wondered ​what he was thinking of. She guessed indeed, but she was too subtle a little person to attempt to fall in with his thoughts, or to be willing to betray her own, by asking him random questions about Mrs. Tregent. She had expressed, as they came away from their luncheon-party, a natural surprise at the coincidence of his having known the mother of her amusing neighbor, but the only other words that dropped from her on the subject were contained in a question that, before she went to bed, she put to him with abrupt gayety, while she carefully placed a marker in a book she had not been reading.
"When is it, then, that we're to call upon this wonderful old friend?"
He looked at her through the smoke of his cigarette. "I don't know. We must wait a little, to allow her time to give some sign."
"Oh, I see!" And Vera took leave of him with one of her sincere little kisses.