Mrs. Collingwood, it must be considered, was not ill content with living. Her aims were too definite, and her devotion to them too complete to allow her to indulge in any vague dissatisfactions. She could lament the wickedness of the world, yet find the antidote for the sorrow the thought had caused in efforts to remedy it. Further, in the sphere of inevitable and intimate things, she and her husband had perhaps only one weak spot, so to speak, in the armour in which they met the world. She, at any rate, went armed like a dragoon through the routine of life, armed against danger and difficulty and snares of the evil one. But this weak spot was in a vital place. She had a son, now some twenty-five years old, who did not live in a close, or anywhere near one. He was an artist--not a landscape painter, for Mrs. Collingwood could have borne that--but a painter of men and women, a recorder of human beauty. That he was rising and successful in his profession was no consolation to his mother, but rather the reverse, and she had before now hesitated whether the text, “I also have seen the wicked in great prosperity,” was not to be pinned to him, for that he was essentially sober and straight in his life she could scarcely believe. He seldom came to Wroxton, for his profession, at which he worked very hard, naturally kept him in London, but he was going to spend a week or two with them in September, after their return from the lakes, and she always found his visits trying. In the first place, it was quite certain that, though he did not smoke in the house out of deference to his mother’s abhorrence of the act, he did smoke in the garden; and in the second, though he never alluded to wine at lunch or dinner, a half-empty bottle of whisky had been found in his bed-room after he had gone. It often seemed cruel to Mrs. Collingwood that she should have had such a son, and in her own mind she was disposed to regard him as but a dubious gift, partaking more of the nature of a cross than of a crown. Jeannie Avesham that afternoon had spoken of him to his mother, saying that, though she did not know him personally, he had been at Oxford with her brother, and the mention of those Oxford days had roused terrible memories in the mind of Mrs. Collingwood, and made her attack on modern fiction bitter and incisive. For he had gone to Oxford with the object of reading theology, and eventually of taking orders, but a day came when he wrote to his father saying he could not do so. He wanted to talk it all over with him, but he feared his decision was irrevocable.