Vance stared at the big wavering script, so like his grandmother’s ungirt frame. For the “Seekers” he cared not a fig; but the springs of boyhood welled up in him at the prospect of seeing Mrs. Scrimser. She was the only human being he had really loved in the days when his universe was enclosed in the few miles between Euphoria and Crampton; the others, parents, sisters even, were just the more or less comfortable furniture of life; but his grandmother’s soul and his had touched. … He thought himself back onto the porch at Crampton, smelt the neglected lilacs, heard the jangle of the Euphoria trolley, and his grandmother saying: “Don’t a day like this make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?” He remembered having answered, rather petulantly, that he didn’t feel as if anything would take him near God; but now he was at least nearer to understanding what she had meant. Perhaps what she called “God” was the same as what he called “The Mothers”—that mysterious Sea of Being of which the dark reaches swayed and rumoured in his soul … perhaps one symbol was as good as another to figure the imperceptible point where the fleeting human consciousness touches Infinity. …
Curious, that this should happen just as he was facing the idea of going back to Euphoria. His grandmother’s letter, the prospect of seeing her in a few days, made the return home appear easier and more natural. As soon as she and Laura Lou had met he would decide. … He was sure those two would take a liking to each other.
Mrs. Scrimser bade him call her up at six on the day when she was to arrive, and he hoped to persuade her to come down that very morning to see Laura Lou, who was still too feverish to leave her bed. Laura Lou was excited and happy at the prospect of the visit; he saw from her eagerness how much she had felt the enforced solitude of her life in New York. “I guess maybe she’ll go round with me a little when I’m better,” she said with her drawn smile.
“Why, I’d go round with you myself if you wanted me to,” Vance rejoined, with conscious hypocrisy; but she said evasively: “Why, how can you, with all your work?”
The day came, and Vance was waiting at the office to call up Mrs. Mennenkoop’s flat when he was told that Mrs. Spear was on the telephone. It was some time since he had seen Mrs. Spear, and he wondered, somewhat nervously, if she could be the bearer of a message from her daughter. The blood began to buzz in his ears, and he could hardly catch the words which tumbled out excitedly from the receiver. But presently, to his surprise, he heard his grandmother’s name. “Only think, Vance, of my not knowing that Mrs. Scrimser—the great Mrs. Scrimser—was your grandmother! She’s just told me so herself, over the telephone. … Why, yes—didn’t you know? She’s coming to speak in our drawing room this very evening. … Of course you knew I was one of the ‘Seekers’? No—you didn’t?” Mrs. Spear was always genuinely surprised when she found that anything concerning herself or her family had not been trumpeted about by rumour. “Why, yes—it’s my life, Vance, my only real life … so marvellous … and now I’m to have the privilege of having this wonderful being under my roof. … You must be with us, of course; you and Laura Lou. … Your grandmother wanted me to tell you not to go out to Bronxville: she’d rather meet you here. Her train was late; there’s barely time for her to take a rest and withdraw into herself—you know they always do, before a meeting. … So she wants you to come here early instead. She says she’s sure you’ll understand. …”
The announcement filled Vance with astonishment. He had had glimpses of some of Mrs. Spear’s hobbies and enthusiasms, and had heard others humorously reported by Halo—but the idea of any connection between the Spear milieu and his grandmother was so unexpected that he began to wonder if, all unconsciously, he had spent his youth with an illustrious woman. Mrs. Spear was in touch with the newest that New York was thinking and saying; Frenside’s decomposing irony was her daily fare; clever and cultivated people of all kinds frequented her house; she was always on the track of the new movements. Did the “Seekers” then represent a movement important enough to attract those whose lead she followed? And was his grandmother actually the prophetess of a new faith? He recalled the religion he had himself “invented” in his boyhood—the creed whose originality had crumbled away with his first glimpse of the old philosophies—and wondered if his grandmother had stumbled on the revelation he had missed. It was all so confounding that he hardly found voice to stammer out his thanks, and his excuses for Laura Lou. … And the Tarrants, he wondered—would they be there? And what did Halo think of the “Seekers”? Above all, what would she think of Mrs. Scrimser?
He had not wished
