Before turning into bed that night Tom had fought to a finish his battle with himself. The victory rested, he hoped, with common sense. He could no longer doubt that before very long an extraordinary offer would be made to him. To repulse it would be insane.
"As far as my personal preferences go," he wrote to Hildred, "I would rather remain as I am. Remaining as I am would be easier. I'm free; I've no one to consider; I know my own way of life, and can follow it pretty surely. But I'm not adaptable. You yourself must often have noticed that my mind works stiffly, and that I find it hard to see the other fellow's point of view. I'm narrow, solitary, concentrated, and self-willed. But as long as I've no one to consult I can get along.
"To enter a family of which I know nothing of the ways or traditions or points of view is going to be a tough job. It will be much tougher than if I merely married into it. In that case I should be only an adjunct to it, whereas in what may happen now I shall have to become an integral part of it. I must be as a leg instead of as a crutch. I don't know how I shall manage it.
"I'm not easily intimate with anyone. Perhaps that's the reason why, as you say, I haven't enough
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 of the lover in me. I'm not naturally a lover. I'm not naturally a friend. I'm a solitary. A solitude à deux, with the servants, as you always like to stipulate, is my conception of an earthly paradise.
"To you the normal of life is a father, a mother, a brother, a sister. To me it isn't. To have a father seems abnormal to me, or to have a sister or a brother. If I can see myself with a mother it's because of a poignant experience of the kind that burns itself into the memory. But I can't see myself with another mother, and that's what I've got to do. Mind you, it isn't a stepmother I must see, nor an adopted mother, nor a mother-in-law; it's a real mother of my own flesh and blood. I must see a real brother, a real sister. They think that all they have to do is to fling their doors open, and that it will be a simple thing for me to walk in. But I must fling open something more tightly sealed than any door ever was—my life, my affections, my point of view. They are four, and need only make room for one. I'm only one, and must make room for four.
"But I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it for a number of reasons which I shall try to give you in their order.
"First, for your sake. You want it. For me that is enough. I see your reasons too. It will help us with your father and mother, and all our future life. So that settles that.
"Then, I want to conform to what those who care anything about me would expect. I don't want to seem a fool. It's what I should seem if I turned such an offer down. Nobody would understand my
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 emotional and sentimental reasons but myself; and when it comes to the emotional and sentimental there is a pro side as well as a con to the whole situation.
"Because if I must have a father there's no one whom I could so easily accept as a father as this very man. He seems to me like my father; I think I seem to him like his son. More than that, he looks like my father, and I must look like the kind of son he would naturally have. I'm sure he likes me, and I know I like him. If I was choosing a father he's the very one I should pick out.
"Next, and you may be surprised to hear me say it, I could do very well with Tad as a brother. That he couldn't do with me is another thing; but there's something about the chap which has bewitched me from the day I first laid eyes on him. I haven't liked him exactly; I've only felt for him a kind of responsibility. I've tried to ignore it, to laugh at it, to argue it down; but the thing wouldn't let me kill it. If there's such a thing as an instinct between those of the same flesh and blood I should say that this was it. I've no doubt that if we come to living in one menagerie we shall be the same sort of friends as a lion and a tiger—but there it is.
"The women appall me. I can't express it otherwise. With the father I could be a son as affectionate as if I'd never left the family. With Tad I could establish—I've established already—a sort of fighting fraternity. To neither the mother nor the daughter could I ever be anything, so far as I can see now. They wouldn't let me. They wouldn't want me. If they yield to the extent of admitting me into the
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 family they'll always bar me from their hearts. The limit of my hope is that, since I generally get along with those I have to live with, the hostility won't be too obvious. I also have the prospect that when you and I are married—and that's my motive in the whole business—I shall get a measure of release."
He purchased next morning a pair of gloves and an inexpensive walking stick so as to look as nearly as might be like the smart young men he saw on the pavements of Fifth Avenue. It was not his object to be smart; it was to be up to the standard of the house at which he was to lunch.
To reach that house he went on the top of a bus like the one on which he had ridden with Honey nearly ten years earlier. He did this with intention, to make the commemoration. Honey's suspicions and predictions had then seemed absurd; and here they were on the eve of being verified.
He got off at the corner at which, as he remembered, Honey and he had got off on that August Sunday afternoon. He crossed the road to see if he could recognize the home of the Whitelaw baby as it had been pointed out to him. Recognition came easily enough because in the whole line of buildings it was the only one which stood detached, with a bit of lawn on all sides of it. A spacious brownstone house, it had the cheery, homey aspect which comes from generous proportions, and masses of spring flowers, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths, banked in the bow-windows.
Being a little ahead of his time, he walked up the street, trying to compose himself and recapture his
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 nerve. The story, first told to him by Honey, and repeated in scraps by many others, returned to him. Too far away to be noticed by anyone who chanced to be looking out, he stood and gazed back at the house. If he was really Harry Whitelaw he had been born there. The last time he had come forth from it he had been carried down those steps by two footmen. He had been wheeled across the street and into the Park by a nurse in uniform. Within the glades of the Park a change had somehow been wrought in his destiny, after which there was a blank. He emerged from that blank into consciousness sitting on a high chair in a kitchen, beating on the table with a spoon, and asking the question: "Mudda, id my name Gracie, or id it Tom?" The memory was both vague and vivid. It was vague because it came out from nowhere and vanished into nowhere. It was vivid because it linked up with that bewilderment as to his identity which haunted his early childhood. The discovery that he was a little boy forced on a woman craving for a little girl was the one with which he first became aware of himself as a living entity.
To his present renunciation of that woman he tried to shut his mind. There was no help for it. He had long kept a veil before this sad holy of holies; he would simply hang it up again. He would nail it up, he would never loosen it, and still less go behind it. What was there would now forever be hidden from any sight, even from his own.
At a minute before one he recrossed the avenue, and went down the little slope. In the rôle of Harry Whitelaw which he was trying to assume going up the
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 steps was significant. The long, devious, apparently senseless odyssey had brought him back again. It was only to himself that the odyssey seemed straight and with a purpose.
The middle-aged man who opened the door raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide in a flash of perturbation. It was only for an instant; in the half of a second he was once more the proper stiffened image of decorum. And yet as he took from the visitor the hat, stick, and gloves, Tom could see that the eyes were scanning his face furtively.
It was a big dim hall, impressive with a few bits of ancient massive furniture, and a stairway in an alcove, partially hidden by a screen which might have been torn from some French cathedral. Tom, who had risen to the modest standard of the Ansleys, again felt his insufficiency.
Following the butler, he went down the length of the hall toward a door on the right. But a door on the left opened stealthily, and stealthily a little figure darted forth.
"So you've come! I knew you would! I knew I shouldn't go down to my grave without seeing you back in the home from which twenty-three years ago you were carried out. I've said so to Dadd times without number, haven't I, Dadd?"
"You have indeed, Miss Nash," Dadd corroborated, "and none of us didn't believe you."
"Dadd was the second footman," Miss Nash explained further. "He was one of the two who lifted you down that morning. Now he's the butler; but he's never had my faith."
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She glided away again. Dadd threw open a door. Tom found himself in a large sunny room, of which the bow-window was filled with flowers.
There was no one there, which was so far a relief. It gave him time to collect himself. Except for apartments in museums, or in some château he had visited in France, he had never been in a room so stately or so full of costly beauty. He knew the beauty was costly in spite of his lack of experience.
On the wall opposite the bow-window stretched a blue-green Flemish tapestry, with sad-eyed, elongated figures crowding on one another within an intricate frame of flowers, foliage, and fruits. A white-marble mantelpiece, bearing in shallow relief three garlanded groups of dancing Cupids, supported a clock and a pair of candelabra in biscuit de Sèvres mounted in ormolu. Above this hung a full-length eighteenth-century lady—Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough—he was only guessing—looking graciously down on a cabinet of European porcelains, on another of miniatures, and another of old fans. Bronzes were scattered here and there, with bits of iridescent Spanish luster, and two or three plaques of Limoges enamel intense in color. Since there was room for everything, the profusion was without excess, and not too carefully thought out. A work-basket filled with sewing materials and knitting stood on a table strewn with recent magazines and books.
He was so long alone that he was growing nervous when Lily dropped into the room as if she had happened there accidentally. She sauntered up to him,
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 however, offering her hand with a long, serpentine lifting of the arm, casual and negligent.
"How-d'ye-do? Mamma's late. I don't know whether she's in the house or not. Perhaps she's forgotten. She often does." She picked up a silver box of cigarettes. "Have one?"
On his declining she lighted one for herself, dropping into a big upright chair and crossing her legs. It was the year when young ladies liked to display their ankles and calves nearly up to the knee. Lily, whose skirt was of unrelieved black, wore violet silk stockings, with black slippers which had bright red buckles set in paste. Over her shoulders a violet scarf, with bright red bars, hung loosely. In sitting, her sinuous figure drooped a little forward, the elbow of the hand which held the cigarette supported on her knee.
Though she hadn't asked him to sit down, he took a chair of his own accord, waiting for her to speak again. When she did so, after an interval of puffing out tiny rings of blue smoke, her voice was languid and monotonous, and yet with overtones of passionate self-will.
"You've been in the army, haven't you?"
He said he had been.
"Did you like it?"
"I never had time to think as to whether I did or not. I just had to stick it out."
"Did you ever see Tad over there?"
"No, I never did."
As she was laconic he too would be laconic. She didn't look at him, or show an interest in his per
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sonality. If she thought him the brother who after long disappearance was coming home again she betrayed no hint of the possibility. He might have been a chance stranger whom she would never see again. Lapses of silence did not embarrass her. She sat and smoked.
He decided to assume the right to ask questions on his own side. "You've been married since I saw you last, haven't you?"
"Yes." She didn't resent this, apparently, and after a long two minutes of silence, added: "and divorced." There was still a noticeable passage of time before she continued, in her toneless voice: "I've a baby too."
"Do you like him?"
A flicker of a smile passed over a profile heavy-browed, handsome, and disdainful. "He's an ugly little monster so far." She had a way of stringing out her sentences as after-thoughts. "I daresay he's all right."
There followed a pause so long and deep that in it you could hear the ticking of the clock. He was determined to be as apathetic as herself. She had no air of thinking. She scarcely so much as moved. Her stillness suggested the torrid, brooding calm before volcanic or seismic convulsion. Without a turning of the head or a change in her languid intonation, she said, casually:
"You're our lost brother, aren't you?"
The emotion from which she was so free almost strangled him. He could barely breathe the words, "Would you care if I were?"
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"What would be the use of my caring if papa was satisfied?"
"Still, I should think, that one way or the other, you might care."
To this challenge she made no response. She was not hostile in any active sense; he was sure of that. She impressed him rather as exhausted after terrific scenes of passion, waywardness, and disillusion. A little rest, and she would be ready for the same again, with himself perhaps to take the consequence.
Mrs. Whitelaw came in with the rapid step and breathless, syncopated utterance he remembered.