ery deliberately.

"My son married against my will. His father was dead, and a woman's
authority was not enough, for he was stubborn, though a good son until
_she_ got hold of him with her witcheries and her false charms. He met
her in London, and took her out of the theatre, where he had no business
to go; and if he never had gone, all our troubles would have been saved.
The woman was a play-actress--a light, frivolous creature with no more
sense of moral responsibility than a butterfly."

"Butterflies are beautiful!" Barrie broke in. "God made them, I suppose,
just as much as He made ants, and I'm sure He loves them heaps better."
She thought of her grandmother as a big black ant, hoarding disagreeable
crumbs in a gloomy hole.

Mrs. MacDonald went on as if she had not heard.

"The woman married my son because he had money, and when she had spent
all she could lay her hands on--spent it on dresses and hats and every
kind of sinful vanity--she left him and his home, left her baby a year
old, to return to the theatre, I suppose. I thank God that I still had
influence with Robert my son to keep him from running after her like a
love-sick fool, and trying to bring her back to the decent home she had
disgraced. But his heart was broken by her wicked folly. Two years
they'd had together under this roof and the disappointments she had made
the boy suffer undermined his health. Two years more he was spared to
me, and then he was taken. Never once did your mother write to him or to
me, not so much as to ask whether her husband and child were alive or
dead. While Robert lived, her things remained in her room just as she
had left them the night she stole away like a thief, carrying only a
handbag. There was the furniture the poor bewitched man had bought
because he thought nothing in his mother's house was fit for his
wonderful bride. There were her clothes--the very dress you have on,
made on purpose to show off her brazen looks in a portrait she induced
my son to order from a painting man. There was everything, except her
jewels, which she was careful to take--jewels more fit for an empress of
a heathen nation than a self-respecting Englishwoman: and that is where
the root of the mischief lay. She wasn't English. I warned my son in the
beginning when he wrote of his infatuation. I said, 'It is bad enough
that she should be a play-actress; but the daughter of an _Irish father_
and an _American mother_, that is _fatal_!' He wo