inst yourself." She paused, and
then went on with a deeper note: "I have let you, as you say, speak
your mind to me in terms that some women might have resented, because I
wanted to show you how little, as the years go on, theories, ideas,
abstract conceptions of life, weigh against the actual, against the
particular way in which life presents itself to us--to women
especially. To decide beforehand exactly how one ought to behave in
given circumstances is like deciding that one will follow a certain
direction in crossing an unexplored country. Afterward we find that we
must turn out for the obstacles--cross the rivers where they're
shallowest--take the tracks that others have beaten--make all sorts of
unexpected concessions. Life is made up of compromises: that is what
youth refuses to understand. I've lived long enough to doubt whether
any real good ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more
beautiful theories. Do I seem casuistical? I don't know--there may be
losses either way...but the love of the man one loves...of the child
one loves... that makes up for everything...."

She had spoken with a thrill which seemed to communicate itself to the
hand her listener had left in hers. Her eyes filled suddenly, but
through their dimness she saw the girl's lips shape a last desperate
denial:

"Don't you see it's because I feel all this that I mustn't--that I
can't?"

III

Mrs. Quentin, in the late spring afternoon, had turned in at the doors
of the Metropolitan Museum. She had been walking in the Park, in a
solitude oppressed by the ever-present sense of her son's trouble, and
had suddenly remembered that some one had added a Beltraffio to the
collection. It was an old habit of Mrs. Quentin's to seek in the
enjoyment of the beautiful the distraction that most of her
acquaintances appeared to find in each other's company. She had few
friends, and their society was welcome to her only in her more
superficial moods; but she could drug anxiety with a picture as some
women can soothe it with a bonnet.

During the six months that had elapsed since her visit to Miss Fenno
she had been conscious of a pain of which she had supposed herself no
longer capable: as a man will continue to feel the ache of an amputated
arm. She had fancied that all her centres of feeling had been
transferred to Alan; but she now found herself subject to a kind of
dual suffering, in which her individual pang was the keener in that it
div