ng
that had been her husband's beyond her modest personal income. In his
anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he had safeguarded
with trustees all he possibly could. The completion of the boy's course
at the public school, to be followed in due time by Oxford and
ordination, had been all previsioned and arranged, and she really had
nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink, and make a
business of indolence, and go on weaving and coiling the nut-brown hair,
merely keeping a home open for the son whenever he came to her during
vacations.

Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in his
lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa in the same
long, straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced, which was to
be hers as long as she chose to live in it. Here she now resided,
looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front, and through the railings
at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward over the window-sill on
the first floor, stretching her eyes far up and down the vista of sooty
trees, hazy air, and drab house-facades, along which echoed the noises
common to a suburban main thoroughfare.

Somehow, her boy, with his aristocratic school-knowledge, his grammars,
and his aversions, was losing those wide infantine sympathies, extending
as far as to the sun and moon themselves, with which he, like other
children, had been born, and which his mother, a child of nature herself,
had loved in him; he was reducing their compass to a population of a few
thousand wealthy and titled people, the mere veneer of a thousand million
or so of others who did not interest him at all. He drifted further and
further away from her. Sophy's _milieu_ being a suburb of minor
tradesmen and under-clerks, and her almost only companions the two
servants of her own house, it was not surprising that after her husband's
death she soon lost the little artificial tastes she had acquired from
him, and became--in her son's eyes--a mother whose mistakes and origin it
was his painful lot as a gentleman to blush for. As yet he was far from
being man enough--if he ever would be--to rate these sins of hers at
their true infinitesimal value beside the yearning fondness that welled
up and remained penned in her heart till it should be more fully accepted
by him, or by some other person or thing. If he had lived at home with
her he would have had all of it; but he seemed to require