y question is, does your wretched son possess it?" But she didn't; she
asked instead, with a tone of disarming sweetness, "Shall we be perfectly
candid with each other?"

A quick gleam came into Mrs. Wayne's eyes. "Not much," she seemed to say.
She had learned to distrust nothing so much as her own candor, and her
interview with Mr. Lanley had put her specially on her guard.

"I hope you will be candid, Mrs. Farron," she said aloud, and for her
this was the depth of dissimulation.

"Well, then," said Adelaide, "you and I are in about the same position,
aren't we? We are both willing that our children should marry, and we
have no objection to offer to their choice except our own ignorance. We
both want time to judge. But how can we get time, Mrs. Wayne? If we do
not take definite action _against_ an engagement, we are giving our
consent to it. I want a little reasonable delay, but we can get delay
only by refusing to hear of an engagement. Do you see what I mean? Will
you help me by pretending to be a very stern parent, just so that these
young people may have a few months to think it over without being too
definitely committed?"

Mrs. Wayne shrank back. She liked neither diplomacy nor coercion.

"But I have really no control over Pete," she said.

"Surely, if he isn't in a position to support a wife--"

"He is, if she would live as he does."

Such an idea had never crossed Mrs. Farron's mind. She looked round her
wonderingly, and said without a trace of wilful insolence in her tone:

"Live here, you mean?"

"Yes, or somewhere like it."

Mrs. Farron looked down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff.
She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not
want to hurt any one's feelings. How could she tell this childlike,
optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like
these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn't
love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence.
She could imagine suffering privations very happily in a Venetian palace
or on a tropical island. It was an esthetic, not a moral, problem; it was
a question of that profound and essential thing in the life of any woman
who was a woman--her charm. She wished to tell Mrs. Wayne that her son
wouldn't really like it, that he would hate to see Mathilde going out in
overshoes; that the background that she, Adelaide, had so expertly
provided for her child was pa