was irrelevant, springing from sources not readily apparent. She
abused the public-school system of England, and sneered at the county
families which blessed the neighbourhood with their presence. She
reviled Lord Durwent's habits, principally because they _were_ habits,
and thought it was high time some Durwent grew up who wasn't just a
'sticky, stuffy, starched, and bored porpoise--yes, PORPOISE!' (shaking
her head as if to establish the metaphor against the whole of the
English aristocracy). In short, it was the spirit of the Ironmonger
castigating the Peerage, and at its conclusion Lady Durwent felt much
abused, and quite pleased with her own rhetoric.

Lord Durwent glanced for courage at an ancestor who looked
magnificently down at him over a ruffle. He adjusted his own cravat
and spoke in nicely modulated accents: 'Sybil, nothing can change me on
this point. In spite of what you say, it is my intention to keep to
the tradition of the Durwents, and that is that the occupant of
Roselawn'----

'What! am not I his mother?' cried the good woman, her hysteria having
much the same effect on Lord Durwent's smoothly developing monologue as
a heavy pail dropped by a stage-hand during Hamlet's soliloquy.

'Sybil,' said Lord Durwent sternly, 'it was arranged at Malcolm's birth
that he should go to Eton. I shall take him next Tuesday to a
preparatory school, and you must excuse me if I refuse to discuss the
matter further.'

Lady Durwent rushed from the room and clasped her eldest child in her
arms. That young gentleman, not knowing what had caused his mother's
grief, sympathetically opened his throat and bellowed lustily, thereby
shedding tears for positively the last time in his life.

When he returned for the holidays a few months later, he was an
excellent example of that precocity, the English schoolboy, who cloaks
a juvenile mind with the pose of sophistication, and by twelve years of
age achieves a code of thought and conduct that usually lasts him for
the rest of his life. In vain the mother strove for her place in the
sun; the rule of the masculine at Roselawn became adamant.

Life in the Durwent _menage_ developed into a thing of laws and customs
dictated by the youthful despot, aided and abetted by his father. The
sacred rites of 'what isn't done' were established, and the mother
gradually found herself in the position of an outsider--a privileged
outsider, it is true, yet little more than the breede