“I believe it all comes from this cigarette smoking, that’s what Ralph used to say, and I think it’s true. Nasty as his pipe was, at least it was healthy. You are all either too difficult and unapproachable, or too talkative. That Bendon girl a few days ago at Mrs. Pender’s told me all her most private and intimate affairs for a whole hour after having met me for the first time. In the old days the girl would have been thought improper. She was the sort of girl your grandfather would have smiled at. He ...” “Mamma!” This was better. “Eh?” “Nothing.” “He always smiled at something he could not understand, and what he could not understand he could not, and of course there was something wrong in it if he could not. In the old days ...” She was off again, and how the old days thrilled her generation, how blind they were not to see the glories of the present and future! Blind. Perhaps in years to come his memories would be only of the time when he had seen the colours and life through his own eyes. But he was becoming sentimental, and surely he had recovered from that phase of his Noat days. What is she saying? (Blind? Yes, blind.) What? “... don’t understand.”--The strain of talking to him of other things! “But why try? Parents will never understand their children. Have you read Turgeniev’s _Fathers and Sons_? There’s a wonderful picture there.” He had not been listening. She had not been able to understand the bailiff’s policy with the pigs. And here he was on to his books again, as if books mattered in life. But one must always show interest, so that he might feel he had someone who took a kindred interest. One had read all those Russian things in one’s teens. One had loved them then, but one saw now what nonsense they had been. “Yes, I read it years ago, when I married. I don’t remember much, but I don’t think it was a tremendously interesting book, do you, dear?” There, they are always like that, “Yes, I read it years ago.” Nothing lives for them but the new, they have forgotten everything else, life itself even! She has always read a book, any book you care to mention, and she has always forgotten all about it, save that she has read it. Irritation! She was dead, withered through not caring; and he was alive, how alive he was! Alive! Alive? And blind, a tomb of darkness, with all the carbuncles of life hidden away! Blind? Yes, blind for ever, always, always blind! No. What is she saying? Nothing, there is silence save for the silken rustling of the rain outside. She must be ill at ease. “Yes,” he says, as one throws a lifebelt at someone drowning. “Dear, I meant to help, and here I am, swearing away just the same. I’m not much of a mother to you, I’m afraid....” Was there no way to help him? When you tried to make him respond to affection he withdrew into himself at once. She would cry if she stayed here much longer. Why did these tragedies come like this? And they were like strangers.