errify me--you terrify me," she again said.

"How can you say that when you showed me just now how well you know me?
Wasn't it just on account of what you thought I might do that you took
out the keys as soon as you came in?" Harold's manner had a way of
clearing up whenever he could talk of himself.

"You're too utterly disgusting--I shall speak to your father," with
which, going to the chair he had given up, his mother sank down again
with her heavy book. There was no anger, however, in her voice, and
not even a harsh plaint; only a detached accepted disenchantment. Mrs.
Brookenham's supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the
last frankness how much she was bored.

"No, darling mummy, you won't speak to my father--you'll do anything in
the world rather than that," Harold replied, quite as if he were kindly
explaining her to herself. "I thank you immensely for the charming way
you take what I've done; it was because I had a conviction of that that
I waited for you to know it. It was all very well to tell you I'd start
on my visit--but how the deuce was I to start without a penny in the
world? Don't you see that if you want me to go about you must really
enter into my needs?"

"I wish to heaven you'd leave me--I wish to heaven you'd get out of the
house," Mrs. Brookenham went on without looking up.

Harold took out his watch. "Well, mamma, now I AM ready: I wasn't in
the least before. But it will be going forth, you know, quite to seek
my fortune. For do you really think--I must have from you what you do
think--that it will be all right for me?"

She fixed him at last with her pretty pathos. "You mean for you to go to
Brander?"

"You know," he answered with his manner as of letting her see her own
attitude, "you know you try to make me do things you wouldn't at all do
yourself. At least I hope you wouldn't. And don't you see that if I so
far oblige you I must at least be paid for it?"

His mother leaned back in her chair, gazed for a moment at the ceiling
and then closed her eyes. "You ARE frightful," she said. "You're
appalling."

"You're always wanting to get me out of the house," he continued; "I
think you want to get us ALL out, for you manage to keep Nanda from
showing even more than you do me. Don't you think your children good
ENOUGH, mummy dear? At any rate it's as plain as possible that if you
don't keep us at home you must keep us in other places. One can't live
anywhere for nothing--i