e
writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his
first photograph of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.

There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin
and flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the
Mission garden. And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;
never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous,
faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of
growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt
itself without her ever being conscious of the change. This hard
bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered.
Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their
views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first,
a joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in
which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she had
died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious
households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was
convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcate
in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his
parents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her)
would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill. And of Mary she was
sure as of her own self. So, having snatched little Bill from the
grave, and given her life in the effort, she went contentedly to her
place in the Archer vault in St. Mark's, where Mrs. Archer already lay
safe from the terrifying "trend" which her daughter-in-law had never
even become aware of.

Opposite May's portrait stood one of her daughter. Mary Chivers was as
tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and
slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required. Mary Chivers's
mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the
twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned. And
the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closely
girt as her figure. Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more
intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. There
was good in the new order too.

The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs,
unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days
when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy h