"Mark's books are to be kept where Mark put them," she said. "But, Mamma, I want them." Never in her life had she wanted anything so much as those books. "When will you learn not to want what isn't yours?" "Mark doesn't want them, or he'd have taken them. He'd give them me if he was here." "He isn't here. I won't have them touched till he comes back." "But, Mamma darling, I may be dead. I've had to wait five years as it is." "Wait? What for, I should like to know?" "To learn Greek, of course." Her mother's face shivered with repugnance. It was incredible that anybody should hate a poor dead language so. "Just because Mark learnt Greek, you think _you_ must try. I thought you'd grown out of all that tiresome affectation. It was funny when you were a little thing, but it isn't funny now." Her mother sat down to show how tired she was of it. "It's just silly vanity." Mary's heart made a queer and startling movement, as if it turned over and dashed itself against her ribs. There was a sudden swelling and aching in her throat. Her head swam slightly. The room, Mark's room, with Mark's white bed in one corner and Dan's white bed in the other, had changed; it looked like a room she had never been in before. She had never seen that mahogany washstand and the greyish blue flowers on the jug and basin. The person sitting on the yellow-painted bedroom chair was a stranger who wore, unaccountably, a brown dress and a gold watch-chain with a gold tassel that she remembered. She had an odd feeling that this person had no right to wear her mother's dress and her chain. The flash of queerness was accompanied by a sense of irreparable disaster. Everything had changed; she heard herself speaking, speaking steadily, with the voice of a changed and unfamiliar person. "Mark doesn't think it's vanity. You only think it is because you want to." The mind of this unfamiliar self had a remorseless lucidity that seemed to her more shocking than anything she could imagine. It went on as if urged by some supreme necessity. "You're afraid. Afraid." It seemed to her that her mother really was afraid. "Afraid? And what of?" her mother said. The flash went out, leaving her mind dark suddenly and defeated. "I don't know what _of_. I only know you're afraid." "That's an awful thing for any child to say to any mother. Just because I won't let you have your own way in everything. Until your will is resigned to God's will I may well be afraid." "How do you know God doesn't want me to know Greek? He may want it as much as I do." "And if you did know it, what good would it do you?"