“Ah,” she said, shaking her head, “that’s just what I mean. Your mother is a beautiful and delightful joke like everything and everybody else. It’s time, Tony, that you were developing. You’re twenty-four, and you seem to me to be exactly where you were at eighteen. Now I don’t want to hurry or worry you, but the perpetual joke won’t do any longer. It isn’t that I myself want you to be anything different, because I don’t. I only want you to be happy; but life’s hard, and I don’t think you can meet it by playing with it.” He said nothing, but he gave her arm a little squeeze. “Then you know,” she went on, “you have absolutely no sense of proportion. Everybody and everything are on exactly the same scale. You don’t seem to me to have any standard by which you estimate things. Everybody is nice and delightful. I don’t believe you ever disliked anybody, and it has always been a wonder to all of us that you haven’t lost more from suffering so many fools gladly. I always used to think that as soon as you fell in love with somebody—really and properly fell in love with some nice girl—that that seriousness would come, and so I didn’t mind. I don’t want to hurry you in that direction, dear, but I would like to see you settled. Really, Tony, you know, you haven’t changed at all, you’re exactly the same; so much the same that I’ve wondered a little once or twice whether you really care for anybody.” “Poor old mother, and my flightiness has worried you, has it? I am most awfully sorry. But God made the fools as well as the wits, and He didn’t ask the fools which lot they wanted to belong to.” “No, but, Tony, you aren’t a fool, that’s just it. You’ve got the brain of the family somewhere, only you seem to be ashamed of it and afraid that people should know you’d got it, and your mother would rather they did know. And then, dear, there is such a thing as family pride. It isn’t snobbery, although it looks like it; it only means, don’t be too indiscriminate. Don’t have just anybody for a friend. It doesn’t matter about their birth, but it does matter about their opinions and surroundings. Some of them have been—well, scarcely clean, dear. I’m sure that Mr. Templar wasn’t a nice man, although I dare say he was very clever; and that man to-night, for instance: I dare say he’s an excellent man in every way, but you owe it to the family to find out just a little about him first; you can’t tell just in a minute——” He stopped her for a minute and looked up at her quite seriously. “I’ll be difficult to change, mother, I’m afraid. How you and father ever produced such a vagabond I don’t know, but vagabond I am, and vagabond I’ll remain in spite of Oxford and the Bond Street tailor. But never you grieve, mother dear, I’ll promise to tell you everything—don’t you worry.” “Yes. But what about settling?” “Oh, settling!” he answered gravely. “Vagabonds oughtn’t to marry at all.” “But you’re happy about everything? You’re satisfied with things as they are?”