The Mark Hopkins Hotel provides the setting for a pivotal family conversation: over dinner and afterward in his mother's suite, Willie Keith confronts his growing doubts about May Wynn and the proposal he made after their time in Yosemite. Against the hotel's elegant comforts, his fatigue and unease make visible how far he has changed since leaving home.

Setting and Reunion

Willie and his mother dine in her suite overlooking the bay. The view is fine, the dinner excellent, and the champagne a rare French vintage, but Willie barely attends to any of it: he picks at his food and leaves his wine in its bucket of melting ice unless his mother reminds him to pour. The scene's material ease contrasts with his distraction and signals that the reunion is not a return to his former contentment.

His mother sees the change as soon as they meet on the pier and reads it more clearly over dinner. Willie's face has narrowed; the softness she remembered as baby fat is giving way to her own cheekbones and square jaw. His expression now suggests fatigue and doggedness rather than his earlier easy good humor. She recognizes that the Caine has changed him, while his gloomy abstraction points to a more immediate trouble involving May.

The Conversation About May

After the meal, Willie's mother asks him to sit beside her on the sofa and takes his hand. He dislikes the gesture because it makes him feel like a child in need of guidance, yet he cannot bring himself to pull away. She defends May as a sweet, good young woman rather than the figure Willie fears she might be, and asks him to trust her judgment.

To explain why she is speaking from experience, she tells Willie that, before marrying his father, Dr. Keith had lived for three years with a nurse while he was a medical student and intern. Willie remembers his father's brief, bleak reference to the nurse from their earlier conversation about May, but says nothing. The disclosure gives the discussion a family history of complicated relationships without resolving Willie's own uncertainty.

Doubt and Delay

Willie's mother presses him to consider the choice rather than letting the engagement proceed without reflection. He tells her that somebody will have to be hurt, and she answers that she does not care so long as it is not him. When she turns away to touch a handkerchief to her eyes, Willie puts an arm around her shoulders and assures her that he understands she is trying to do what she believes is right.

Alone in the bedroom, pacing between the twin beds and dresser, Willie recognizes the reasons his confidence in the proposal is collapsing. He believes he proposed partly from guilt, suspects he may have mistaken May's surrender for a bid for marriage, feels ashamed of her background, and cannot imagine her as a partner in an academic life. He is unsure whether he loves her; the night in Yosemite has clouded his feelings with doubt and ill will. Seeing himself pale in the mirror, he turns his anger on his own indecision, then asks his mother to stop discussing the matter and give him time. He says that nothing will be done the next day. The hotel encounter therefore ends not in a settled choice but in a postponement, with Willie's engagement exposed as a decision he no longer trusts.