"If he had only been born with eyes like other people's!" she would moan.
The actual mental state of Truesdale was, however, with Jane and with everybody else, a matter of pure conjecture. Very little, in fact, was seen of him. He breakfasted in his own room, as he had done ever since his return home. When the waitress had declined to enter the chamber with his coffee and rolls he had shrugged his shoulders and had directed to have them set on the floor outside. "_Quelle pudeur!_" he more than once observed, as her knock drew him towards the door. His lunch he took wherever he happened to be, and he dined at his French restaurant, or at a new Italian one where the _spaghetti_ was unapproachable, and where everything was cheap, plentiful, and informal. He returned home at his own discretion, and sometimes was heard working upon the obdurate old night-lock at midnight or later.
Among the first of the family to have extended speech with him after the _exposé_ was his aunt Lydia. He had gone to her house to put the last few finishing touches to Bertie Patterson's portrait. To his aunt and to Bertie herself the portrait seemed already finished, but it is only the artist who knows when the end has really been reached. He asked his aunt for Bertie.
"Well," she hesitated, as she looked at him with a kind of furtive and wondering interest, "Bertie is very busy this afternoon. If there is anything more to be done--and I don't exactly see that there is--it must be done without her, I'm afraid."
"Can't I see her?" he asked, brusquely. "This is the very time I need her. What is she so busy about?"
"She is packing. You know I've kept her a good deal longer already than I expected to--she can't stay into summer. Her mother has written several times, asking for her, and now, finally, she's really got to go." There was a grieving disappointment in Mrs. Rhodes's voice, and a cast of keen but discreet curiosity in her eye.
"In the morning. Then her own people will get her well before dark."
"I'm not to see her to say good-bye?--my own cousin, almost."
"Nonsense--not at all. I'll tell her good-bye for you."
"Well, _that_ we may consider finished, I think." Her eyes were resting on the wall behind him. He turned and saw the portrait fastened upon it.