The great house had given to the General's wife her proper setting.
She had trailed her satins and silks up and down the marble stairway.
Her slender hands, heavy with their rings, had rested on its
balustrade, its mirrors had reflected the diamond tiara with which the
General had crowned her. In the vast drawing room, the gold and jade
and ivory treasures in the cabinets had seemed none too fine for this
greatest treasure of them all. In the dining room the priceless
porcelains had been cheapened by her greater worth. The General had
travelled far and wide, and he had brought the wealth of the world to
lay at the feet of his young wife. He adored her and he adored her son.

"It is just you and me, Derry," the old man had said in the first
moment of bereavement; "we've got to stick it out together--"

And they had stuck it out until the war had come, and patriotism had
flared, and the staunch old soldier had spurned this--changeling.

It seemed to Derry that if his mother could only step down from the
picture she might make things right for him. But she would not step
down. She would go on smiling her gentle painted smile as if nothing
really mattered in the whole wide world.

Thus, with his father asleep in the lacquered bed, and his mother
smiling in her gilded frame, the son stood alone in the great shell of
a house which had in it no beating heart, no throbbing soul to answer
his need.

Derry's rooms were furnished in a lower key than those in which his
father's taste had been followed. There were gray rugs and gray walls,
some old mahogany, the snuff-box picture of Napoleon over his desk, a