"Yes, it is true that Rrchud isn't like other women's boys. You know it, Meta. Angela evidently knows it, and--at least since yesterday--I know that I know it. His not being able to read or write--I always knew in my heart that my old worn-out tag--'We can't all be literary geniuses'--didn't meet the case. His way of disappearing and never explaining.... Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys, doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy. Well, then, as you know, he couldn't get a commission, couldn't even get his stripe, poor darling. He deserted twice--pure absence of mind--it was always the same from a child--'I wanted to see further,' he'd say, and of course worse in the trenches. Why, you know it all, Angela dear--at least, perhaps not quite all. I should like to tell you--because you said that about the splendour of being the mother of Rrchud.... "Pinehurst--my husband, he is a doctor, you know--had that same passion for seeing further. He was often ill in London. I said it was asthma, but he said it was not being able to see far enough. We were in America for Rrchud's birth, and Pinehurst insisted on going West. I took the precaution of having a good nurse with me. Pinehurst said the East was full of little obstacles, and people's eyes had sucked all the secrets out of the horizon, he said. I like Cape Cod, but he said there was always a wall of sea round those flat wet places. We stayed in a blacksmith's spare room on the desert of Wyoming, but even that horizon seemed a little higher than we, and one clear day, in a pink sunrise, we saw something that might have been a dream, my dears, and might have been the Rockies. Pinehurst couldn't stand that, we pushed west--so tahsome. We climbed a little narrow track up a mountain, in a light buggy that a goldminer lent us. Oh, of course, you'll think us mad, Meta, but, do you know, we actually found the world's edge, a place with no horizon; we looked between ragged pine trees, and saw over the shoulders of great old violet mountains--we saw right down into the stars for ever.... There was a tower of rocks--rose-red rocks in sloping layers--sunny hot by day, my dears, and a great shelter by night. You know, the little dark clouds walk alone upon the mountain tops at sunset--as you said, Angela--they are like trees, and sometimes like faces, and sometimes like the shadows of little bent gipsies.... I used to look at the mountains and think: 'What am I about, to be so worried and so small, in sight of such an enormous storm of mountains under a gold sky?' I think of those rocks often at night, standing just as we left them, all by themselves, under that unnatural moon,--it was an unnatural moon on the edge of the world there,--all by themselves, with no watching eyes to spoil them, as Pinehurst used to say, not even one's