However, I really belonged nowadays to a different
generation; I was more the mother's contemporary than the son's.
Mrs. Nettlepoint was at home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where
the wide windows opened to the water. The room was dusky--it was too hot
for lamps--and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the
little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights
of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing on the loved
ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren;
but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me,
pointing with her fan to the Back Bay: "I shall see nothing more charming
than that over there, you know!" She made me very welcome, but her son
had told her about the _Patagonia_, for which she was sorry, as this
would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature in any boat and
mainly confined to her cabin even in weather extravagantly termed fine--as
if any weather could be fine at sea.
"Ah then your son's going with you?" I asked.
"Here he comes, he'll tell you for himself much better than I can pretend
to." Jasper Nettlepoint at that moment joined us, dressed in white
flannel and carrying a large fan. "Well, my dear, have you decided?" his
mother continued with no scant irony.
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