Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/171

 Bennett's figure was as alert and as wiry as ever; her hair was as black, her glance as sharp. Time's chisel had not been keen enough to do much execution on that resolute countenance. All the deeper had been its marks upon her son's face. At the age of fifty, Anson Bennett looked older, duller, wearier than his mother.

This especially when his face was in repose, as was usually the case, and never more so than when undergoing a remonstrance from his mother.

They were sitting together at dinner one Sunday noon in November. Mrs. Bennett behind her cold joint, looking precisely as Anson remembered her from his earliest childhood. Not that the fashion of her dress or of her surroundings had remained unchanged. Mrs. Bennett prided herself not a little upon her modishness. A plain white china service had, in accordance with the fashion of the day, superseded the old blue stoneware, which, with its Dutch canal views and inconsequent minarets, had been the delight of Anson's childhood; an elaborate plated-silver caster adorned the middle of the table; while on the wall opposite him a many-hued chromo had taken the place of the two cheap companion prints once dear to his heart. Yet amid all these changes his mother's face seemed to him quite unaltered, and the voice in which she did her fault-finding was the same voice at whose sound he had trembled before he learned to recognize any higher authority than that of its owner.