XXII


What welcome Linda met in New York came from Mr. Moses Feldt, who
embraced her warmly enough, but with an air slightly ill at ease. He
begged her to kiss her mama, who was sometimes hurt by Linda's
coldness. She made no reply, and found the same influence and
evidence of the power of suggestion in Judith. "We thought maybe you
wouldn't care to come back here," the latter said pointedly, over
her shoulder, while she was directing the packing of a trunk. The
Feldts were preparing for their summer stay at the sea.

Her mother's room resembled one of the sales of obvious and
expensive attire conducted in the lower salons of pleasure hotels.
There were airy piles of chiffon and satin, inappropriate hats and
the inevitable confections of silk and lace. "It's not necessary to
ask if you were right at home with your father's family," Mrs.
Condon observed with an assumed casual inattention. "I can see you
sitting with those old women as dry and false as any. No one saved
me in the clacking, I'm sure."

"We didn't speak of you," Linda replied. She studied, unsparing, the
loose flesh of the elder's ravaged countenance. Her mother, she
recognized, hated her, both because she was like Bartram Lowrie and
still young, with everything unspent that the other valued and had
lost. In support of herself Mrs. Feldt asserted again that she had
"lived," with stacks of friends and flowers, lavish parties and
devoted attendance.

"You may be smarter than I was," she went on, "but what good it does