Still in ignorance of the prospects, she arrived in Paris late in the afternoon and went straight to the house in the Avenue du Bois where her son waited her in the small sitting room. Black and untidy, with her precious reticule swung over her fat arm, she closed the door behind her and faced him in a fury. She did not greet him. She did not even wait for him to speak.
"What is it you have done now? I know it is your fault. You have ruined everything." Her beady eyes glittered and she panted for breath as she flung herself down, thinking "After I work for years to accomplish this marriage."
He smiled at her. "I have done nothing," he said. "I do not know why she ran away."
But she knew he was lying. "You do know," she cried. "You do know. It is another woman. . . . Why can't you leave women alone? You," she mocked, "who thought yourself so wise, so clever with women, have ruined everything again." Her fury mounted and she began to shriek at him incoherently like a mad woman. "She will never divorce you as Sabine did. . . . Of what use are you to any one? Who would regret it if you died? You are worthless. . . . You are a waster . . . a devil." She beat her reticule with her fat bejeweled hands and gasped for breath. "I spend all my life caring for your fortune and you only waste it and run after women. . . . What sort of a man are you? You cannot even give me an heir. . . . There is a curse on you."
Callendar stood by the open window looking out, his back the picture of a cold and maddening indifference. It must have been clear to him that she cared more for her fortune than for her son. Her fortune . . . It was the one thing left her now, and what could she do with it? She could not take it into her grave. She could not even rest there knowing that it was being wasted and would in the end be broken up into small bits and distributed among obscure cousins she had never seen . . . the fortune which her family, the family of the green-eyed old banker of Pera, had built up over centuries. . . .
