It was a game, enjoyable so long as it lasted.

Egotistical he knew himself to be, but it was a conscious fault; to tickle his own vanity filled him with the same satisfaction a cat feels at having its back rubbed, and he excused himself by reasoning that his deceit harmed nobody.

Meanwhile, with feline alertness he waited for a mouse to appear.
He was relieved one day to receive a telegram from Gus Briskow asking him to meet Ma and Allie at the evening train and "get them a hotel." He managed to secure a good suite at the Ajax, and it was with genuinely pleasurable anticipation that he drove to the station.
Dismay smote him, however, at first sight of the new arrivals.

Ma Briskow resembled nothing so much as one of those hideous "crayon enlargements" he had seen in farmhouses--atrocities of an art long dead--for she was clad in an old-fashioned basque and skirt of some stiff, near-silk material, and her waist, which buttoned far down the front and terminated in deep points, served merely to roof over but not to conceal a peculiarity of figure which her farm dress had mercifully hidden.

Gray discovered that Ma's body, alas! bore a quaint resemblance in outline to a gourd.