She came closer. “Get him away from her. It’s only a boy’s infatuation for something new and strange. Tell him how it will spoil his career. You’ve only got to speak to your father for all his plans to come tumbling to the ground. He’ll listen to that. He hasn’t lost all his senses--not yet. Besides, she wouldn’t want him then. She isn’t out to marry a struggling young solicitor without capital. You can take that from me.” She laughed. Betty looked at her. “You would have me injure him?” she said. “Yes; to save him from her,” answered the other, “she has changed him already. There are times when I don’t seem to know him. She will ruin him if she has her way. Save him. You can.” The woman’s vehemence had exhausted her. She dropped back into her chair. “Listen,” said the girl. “I do love your son. I love him so well that if he and this girl really loved one another and I was sure of it, I would do all I could to help him to marry her. It all depends upon that: if they really love one another.” The woman made to speak, but the girl silenced her with a gesture. “Let me try and explain myself to you,” she said, “because after tonight we must never talk about this thing again. I should have been very happy married to Anthony. I knew he did not love me. There is a saying that in most love affairs one loves and the other consents to be loved. That was all I asked of him. I did not think he was capable of love--not in the big sense of the word. I thought him too self-centred, too wrapped up in his ambition. I thought that I could make him happy and that he would never know, that he would come to look upon me as a helper and a comrade. That perhaps with children he would come to feel affection for me, to have a need of me. I could have been content with that.” She had been standing with her elbow resting on the mantelpiece, gazing into the fire. Now she straightened herself and looked the other in the eyes. “But I am glad I was wrong,” she went on. “I’d be glad to think that he could love--madly, foolishly, if you will--forgetting himself and his ambition, forgetting all things, feeling that nothing else mattered. Of course, if it could have been for me”--she gave a little smile--“that would have been heaven. But I would rather--honestly rather that he loved this girl than that he never loved any one--was incapable of love. It sounds odd, but I love him the better for it. He is greater than I thought him.” The other was staring at her. The girl moved over to her and laid a hand upon her shoulder. “I know what you are thinking,” she said. “It doesn’t last. A few years at most and the glory has departed. I’m not so sure of that.”