"Oh, Clive, don't be a fool. You can't do what you're doing without arousing suspicion everywhere—from a village sewing-circle to the smartest gathering on Manhattan Island! You know it."
"I have never thought about it."
"Then think of it now. Whether it's rotten, as you say, or not, it's so. It's one of the folk-ways of the human species. And if it is, merely saying it's rotten can't alter it."
Mrs. Bailey's car was at the door; Clive took the great sable coat from the maid who brought it and slipped it over the handsome afternoon gown that his handsome mother wore.
For a moment he stood, looking at her almost curiously—at the brilliant black eyes, the clear smooth olive skin still youthful enough to be attractive, at the red lips, mostly nature's hue, at the cheeks where the delicate carmine flush was still mostly nature's.
He said: "You have so much, mother.... It seems strange you should not be more generous to a girl you have never seen."
His handsome, capable, and experienced mother gazed at him out of friendly and amused eyes from which delusion had long since fled. And that is where she fell short, for delusion is the offspring of imagination; and without imagination no intelligence is complete. She said: "I can be generous with any woman except where my son concerns himself with her. Where anybody else's son is involved I could be generous to any girl, even—" she smiled her brilliant smile—"even perhaps not too maliciously generous. But the situation in your case doesn't appeal to me as humorous. Keep away from her, Clive; it's easier than ultimately to run away from her."