Explore "The Fruit of the Tree" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on the flow of her friend's reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs. Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and grace -- looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from their next meeting.
"Say, John -- the boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself too aloof from such contacts to resent them.