rful handle for
one's friends. At any rate Poff had escaped that. But this Prothero!

"But who IS this Billy Prothero?" she asked one evening in the walled
garden.

"He was at Minchinghampton."

"But who IS he? Who is his father? Where does he come from?"

Benham sought in his mind for a space. "I don't know," he said at last.
Billy had always been rather reticent about his people. She demanded
descriptions. She demanded an account of Billy's furniture, Billy's
clothes, Billy's form of exercise. It dawned upon Benham that for some
inexplicable reason she was hostile to Billy. It was like the unmasking
of an ambuscade. He had talked a lot about Prothero's ideas and the
discussions of social reform and social service that went on in his
rooms, for Billy read at unknown times, and was open at all hours to any
argumentative caller. To Lady Marayne all ideas were obnoxious, a form
of fogging; all ideas, she held, were queer ideas. "And does he call
himself a Socialist?" she asked. "I THOUGHT he would."

"Poff," she cried suddenly, "you're not a SOCIALIST?"

"Such a vague term."

"But these friends of yours--they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties
and everything complete."

"They have ideas," he evaded. He tried to express it better. "They give
one something to take hold of."

She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him,
very seriously. "I hope," she said with all her heart, "that you will
have nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!"

"They make a case."

"Pooh! Any one can make a case."

"But--"

"There's no sense in them. What is the good of talking about upsetting
everything? Just disorder. How can one do anything then? You mustn't.
You mustn't. No. It's nonsense, little Poff. It's absurd. And you may
spoil so much.... I HATE the way you talk of it.... As if it wasn't
all--absolutely--RUBBISH...."

She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.

Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends,
as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had never
thought about anything in all her life for more than half an hour--and
it had always turned out remarkably well.

Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go on
telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?

"I wish sometimes," his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp
note in her voice, "that you wouldn't look quite so like your father."