“I have not been so fortunate, then,” he said. Michael remembered his mother’s anxious face, but he could not let this pass. “No, sir,” he said, “but you never answered any of my letters. I thought it quite probable that it displeased you to hear from me.” “I should have expressed my displeasure if I had felt it,” said his father with all the pomposity that was natural to him. “That had not occurred to me,” said Michael. “I am afraid I took your silence to mean that my letters didn’t interest you.” He paused a moment, and his rebellion against the whole of his father’s attitude flared up. “Besides, I had nothing particular to say,” he said. “My life is passed in the pursuit of which you entirely disapprove.” He felt himself back in boyhood again with this stifling and leaden atmosphere of authority and disapproval to breathe. He knew that Francis in his place would have done somehow differently; he could almost hear Aunt Barbara laughing at the pomposity of the situation that had suddenly erected itself monstrously in front of him. The fact that he was Michael Comber vexed his father--there was no statement of the case so succinctly true. Lord Ashbridge moved away towards the window, turning his back on Michael. Even his back, his homespun Norfolk jacket, his loose knickerbockers, his stalwart calves expressed disapproval; but when his father spoke again he realised that he had moved away like that, and obscured his face for a different reason. “Have you noticed anything else about your mother?” he asked. That made Michael understand. “Yes, father,” he said. “I daresay I am wrong about it--” “Naturally I may not agree with you; but I should like to know what it is.” “She’s afraid of you,” said Michael. Lord Ashbridge continued looking out of the window a little longer, letting his eyes dwell on his own garden and his own fields, where towered the leafless elms and the red roofs of the little town which had given him his own name, and continued to give him so satisfactory an income. There presented itself to his mind his own picture, painted and framed and glazed and hung up by himself, the beneficent nobleman, the conscientious landlord, the essential vertebra of England’s backbone. It was really impossible to impute blame to such a fine fellow. He turned round into the room again, braced and refreshed, and saw Michael thus.