ly grieved by what
he had told her. She would have helped cheerfully if it had been
possible to her nature; but stronger than compassion, stronger even than
reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had
bred. He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined
face, that even if he took her with him to that basement room, she would
see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be. Her
romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through
imagination, with the edge of reality.

And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that
something had broken down within his soul--some barrier between himself
and humanity. The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him
from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything
but the hole in the carpet. Never again could he take his inherited
place in the world of which he had once been a part. For an instant a
nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look
of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a
spasm. Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the
very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of
self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of
giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this
ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a
coffin.

With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father. "Isn't there
some way out of it, Dad?"

The muscles about Mr. Culpeper's mouth contracted as if he were going
to cry; but when he spoke his voice was completely under control. "I
can't interfere, son, with the way the agent manages the property," he
answered, "but, of course, if you have discovered a peculiarly
distressing case--if it is an object of charity--"

He paused abruptly in amazement, for Stephen was laughing, laughing in a
way, as Mrs. Culpeper remarked afterward, that nobody had ever even
thought of laughing before the whole world had become demoralized.

"Damn charity!" he exclaimed hilariously. "I beg your pardon, Mother,
but if you only knew how inexpressibly funny it is!" Then the laughter
stopped, and a wistful look came into his eyes, for beyond the broken
walls he saw Patty Vetch in her red cape, and around her stretched the
wind-swept roads of that hidden country.

A minute later, as he left the room, his m