“They make a case.”
“Pooh! Any one can make a case.”
“But—”
“There's no sense in them. What is the good of talking about upsetting everything? Just disorder. How can one do anything then? You mustn't. You mustn't. No. It's nonsense, little Poff. It's absurd. And you may spoil so much.... I HATE the way you talk of it.... As if it wasn't all—absolutely—RUBBISH....”
She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends, as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had never thought about anything in all her life for more than half an hour—and it had always turned out remarkably well.
Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go on telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?
“I wish sometimes,” his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp note in her voice, “that you wouldn't look quite so like your father.”
“But I'm NOT like my father!” said Benham puzzled.
“No,” she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason, “so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression....”