"If you can put it like that to my mother," said Peter, still busy with his pipe, but speaking very emphatically, "why, all I can say is, that I believe it's the way to get round her. I've often noticed how useless it seems to talk common-sense to her. But a word of sentiment—and there you are. Strange to say, she likes nothing better than—er—poetry. I hope you don't mind my calling you rather poetical," said Peter, in a tone of sincere apology. "I wish, John, you'd go straight to my mother, and put the whole case before her, just like that."
"The whole case!" said John. "But, my dear fellow, that's only half the case."
"What do you mean?"
"The other half," said John, "is the case from her point of view."
"I don't see," said Peter, "how her point of view can be different from mine."
John's thoughts flew back to a February evening, more than two years earlier. It seemed to him that Sir Timothy stood before him, surprised, pompous, argumentative. But he saw only Peter, looking at him with his father's grey eyes set in a boy's thin face.
"My experience as a barrister," he said, with a curious sense of repeating himself, "has taught me that it is possible for two persons to take diametrically opposite views of the same question."
"And what happens then?" said Peter, stupidly.
"Our bread and butter."
"But why should my mother leave the place she's lived in for years and years, and go gadding about all over the world—at her time of life? I don't see what can be said for the wisdom of that?"