Yet she came with
ardent eagerness and her nephew was plainly glad to have her. It took May
a little while to understand why, but soon she saw the reason. Aunt Maria
was deep in the conspiracy, or the infatuation, or whatever it was to be
called; she flattered Quisante's hope of life, she applauded his defiance
of the inevitable; she hung on him more and more, herself forgetting and
making him forget the peril of the way he trod. He wanted to be told that
he was right, and he wanted an applauding audience. In both ways Aunt
Maria satisfied him. She would talk of the present as though it were no
more than a passing interruption of a long career, of the future as
though it stretched in assured leisure through years of great
achievement, of his life and his life's work as though both were in his
own hand and subject to nothing save his own will and power. She was to
him the readiest echo of the world's wonder and applause, the readiest
assurance that his great effort was not going unrecognised. Hence he
would have her with him, though there seemed no more love and no more
tenderness between them than when in old days they had quarrelled and he
had grumbled and she had flung him her money with a bitter jeer.
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