"Has your son said so?"
"He's said worse. He's said that if he didn't do it, he ought to have. That's the way he talks. Oh, he's no comfort to me! I knew he wouldn't be, after that awful place, but I didn't look for him to be quite what he is, wanting to kill and blow up everything. An I. I. A. is what he calls himself, and the Lord only knows what that is. I blame myself," she went on, with dry, unrelenting statement of the case. "I didn't bring them up right. I was discontented—"
"Oh, but there's a discontent that's divine," Lois broke in, consolingly.
"Well, this wasn't it. It was 'hateful and hating one another,' as Paul says. I put it into their heads—I mean Fay's and the children's. Matt'd commit murder now as quick as a kitten'll lap milk—or he says he would; and as for Fay—"
Lois interrupted, hurriedly, "We shouldn't do him the injustice of condemning him in advance, should we?"
The woman held herself erect, her hard, uncompromising eyes, in which there was nevertheless an odd suffusion of softness, looking straight over her companion's head. "I can't help what I know."
"And I can't help what I know, which is that you and I have nothing to do with judgment, still less with condemnation. There are others to attend to that, while we try to bring"—she uttered the word with diffidence—"try to bring love."
"Oh, love!" The tone was that of one who had long ago given up anything so illusory.
"Then whatever we can find that will take the place of love," Lois replied, with relief at getting back to ground of which she was more sure. "Let us call it good will."
Good will was, in fact, what Reuben Hilary had called it, and it was from him she was quoting. Having gone to him for the analysis of her own state of mind, she had been comforted to learn that she placed no impediment in the way of public justice through being privately merciful.