“You— But how can you say such a thing? Your understanding with Theodora is perfect. You kindle, you glow, when you are telling her stories from the classics.”

“That’s because she isn’t a child. I believe she never was. But my affection for her didn’t begin when she was.... The first few months, I believe I hated her. I may tell you about it some time. When I lose patience with my mother—and other women—I think about that hideous afternoon, twelve years ago last December. I don’t believe any child—or anything else that men and women are at such a bother to create and leave behind them—is worth all that suffering.”

Mrs. Ascott withdrew, ever so little. She did not like Larimore Trench when his tone revealed that peculiar timbre, that quality of boyish cynicism. He had seen so much of books, so little of life. And then it came to her that he viewed everything in the sordid world—the world outside his imagination—through the distorting lenses of his mother’s personality, her limitations and her prejudices. In his most violent opposition he was, nevertheless, directed by her. He would go to the south pole ... because she stood obstinately at the north. It was she who shaped his course, determined his stand. Her insistence on the fundamental importance of material progress drove him early to the post of disinterested onlooker. That he did his work, and did it well, was a reflex of his inner nature, the nature that came to him when David’s fineness and Lavinia’s dynamic ardour were fused, in a moment of unthinking contact. And it was the penalty of such fusing, that neither of his parents comprehended the nature they had given him.

IV

The silence towered, opaque and forbidding, between them. But they had come with a purpose, groping their way to the same objective, neither one guessing what was in the other’s mind. By a devious path, that was nevertheless essentially feminine, Judith approached:

“Lary, do you want to tell me about your brother? It would have made such a difference in Eileen’s life—if he had lived.”

“You would have enjoyed Bob—a tremendous fellow, every phase of him. He played half-back on the college team when he was sixteen. And at that, he took the state cup in the half mile dash. He had medals for hammer throwing and pole vault. There is a whole case of his cups and ribbons in the college library. He’s the only one of us who inherited my mother’s energy. Oh, Sylvia, of course. She can rattle around and make a great showing—and she does actually accomplish things when she has a definite purpose ... something she wants to do. The rest of us are a listless pack. We’d rather climb a tree and watch the parade go by. But Bob was in everything, for the sheer fun of living. It looks to me like a stupid blunder ... to cut off such virility before it had perpetuated itself.”

“Eileen told me she had lost her respect for God, since her brother was drowned. She was so naïve and in such deadly earnest.”

“Eileen was a born doubter. I was sixteen when I revolted against the idea of a Deity with the duties of an ordinary stockroom clerk—and it was one of Eileen’s searching questions that set me thinking. Not bad for six years old. Mamma holds to the old orthodox belief as one of the hallmarks of respectability. In her day, and town, the iconoclasts were pool-room keepers and saloon bums. The catechism was drilled into us as soon as we could talk. My mother would have been a great ritualist, if she had had the luck to be born an Anglican. There isn’t much in her church to hang your hat on.”

“But your father, Lary—religion means something to him.”