in passing to the carriage, had lingered on the gravel-path
close to us, and had, of course, overheard the dialogue. She passed
on with a look of hate. I thought it wise to bid Winifred good-bye
and join my mother.

As I stepped into the carriage I turned round and saw that Winifred
was again looking wistfully at some particular part of me--looking
with exactly that simple, frank, 'objective' expression with which I
was familiar.

'I knew it was the crutches she missed,' I said to myself as I sat
down by my mother's side; 'she'll have to love me now because I am
_not_ lame.'

I also knew something else: I must prepare for a conflict with my
mother. My father, at this time in Switzerland, had written to say
that he had been suffering acutely from an attack of what he called
'spasms.' He had 'been much subject to them of late, but no one
considered them to be really dangerous.'

During luncheon I felt that my mother's eyes were on me. After it was
over she went to her room to write in answer to my father's letter,
and then later on she returned to me.

'Henry,' she said, 'my overhearing the dialogue in the churchyard
between you and Wynne's daughter was, I need not pay, quite
accidental, but it is perhaps fortunate that I did overhear it.'

'Why fortunate, mother? You simply heard her say that her aunt in
Wales had forbidden her to answer a childish letter of mine written
years ago.'

'In telling you which, the girl, I must say, proclaimed her aunt to
be an exceedingly sensible and well-conducted woman,' said my mother.

'On that point, mother,' I said, 'you must allow me to hold a
different opinion. I, for my part, should have said that Winifred's
story proclaimed her aunt to be a worthy member of a flunkey society
like this of ours--a society whose structure, political and moral and
religious, is based on an adamantine rock of paltry snobbery.'

It was impossible to restrain my indignation.

'I am aware, Henry,' replied my mother calmly, 'that it is one of the
fashions of the hour for young men of family to adopt the language of
Radical newspapers. In a country like this the affectation does no
great harm, I grant, and my only serious objection to it is that it
implies in young men of one's own class a lack of originality which
is a little humiliating. I am aware that your cousin, Percy Aylwin,
of Rington Manor, used to talk in the same strain as this, and ended
by joining the Gypsies. But I came to warn yo