She watched him narrowly while she spoke, then gave a quick glance at her nurse, as if to see that they were not making signals to each other. There was an easy chair just behind her head, and as Michael wheeled it up near her sofa, he looked at the nurse. She moved her hand slightly towards the left, and interpreting this, he moved the chair a little to the left, so that he would not sit, as he had intended, quite close to the sofa.
“And you enjoyed your day in the country, mother?” asked Michael.
She looked at him sideways and slowly. Then again, as if recollecting a task she had committed to memory, she answered.
“Yes, so much,” she said. “All the trees and the birds and the sunshine. I enjoyed them so much.”
She paused a moment.
“Bring your chair a little closer, my darling,” she said. “You are so far off. And why do you wait, nurse? I will call you if I want you.”
Michael felt one moment of sickening spiritual terror. He understood quite plainly why Nurse Baker did not want him to go near to his mother, and the reason of it gave him this pang, not of nervousness but of black horror, that the sane and the sensitive must always feel when they are brought intimately in contact with some blind derangement of instinct in those most nearly allied to them. Physically, on the material plane, he had no fear at all.
He made a movement, grasping the arm of his chair, as if to wheel it closer, but he came actually no nearer her.
“Why don’t you go away, nurse?” said Lady Ashbridge, “and leave my son and me to talk about our nice day in the country?”
Nurse Baker answered quite naturally.