Mrs. Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of implications and assumptions where the lightest word may shake down the dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes more difficult between them than had their union been less close.
Presently she ventured, "It's impossible?"
"Impossible?"
She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip and inflict a cut. "What she suggests."
Her son, raising himself, turned to look at her for the first time. Their glance met in a shock of comprehension. He was with her against the girl, then! Her satisfaction overflowed in a murmur of tenderness.
"Of course not, dear. One can't change—change one's life...."
"One's self," he emended. "That's what I tell her. What's the use of my giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?"
The psychological distinction attracted her. "Which is it she minds most?"
"Oh, the paper—for the present. She undertakes to modify the point of view afterward. All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy: the gift of grace will come later."
Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup. Her son's first words had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in the thick of a crowd that he could not see. It was horrible to feel herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if anything could have increased her misery it would have been the discovery that her ghosts had become visible.