"Of course not." * * * As the end of the month drew near Bennett realised that it was not going to be so easy as he had thought to break the surprising and splendid news to his mother. He knew so little about her, and had always had great difficulty in talking to her even about the most impersonal matters. There had been differences between them before, many trifling, and one serious, over his secession to the High Church fold. All these differences now rose up and stood like a thick-set hedge between him and her. . . . As long as he remembered her she had been always sitting in the middle of the dark drawing-room waiting and watching for the landmarks of the day--dinner at one, his brothers' return from the bank, his own return from his office, tea, supper, the hour for sleep--as time bore her evenly past them. For years now his only long conversations with her had been at the end of the month when he gave her his earnings and received his dole for spending. It made him ashamed and unhappy to know that he disliked her, but he could not explain it away, and he had never made any attempt to understand why she was as she was--cold and hard and unresponding. If he took sides at all in the antagonism of drawing-room and dining-room his leaning was towards his father, but that was because the only intimacy in the house lay between Tibby and old Lawrie. There was more warmth in the dining-room than in the drawing-room, though, outwardly, it was his father who was disgraced and deposed, his father whom Bennett had been taught to contemn. . . . The only link that bound him to his mother was money. He would use the monthly conversation about money as an opening for his declaration of independence. He had not looked upon it as that: had not contemplated a rupture and open breach between himself and his mother, though he had heard muttered warnings in the depths of his soul. When he returned home with seven pounds in his pocket, he hesitated for a long time outside the drawing-room door with every nerve in his body throbbing. His suffering was too great and he decided that he would tell his father first. After all, his father was the head of the family. . . . He walked gropingly down the dark passage to the dining-room only to find his father out and Tibby working for dear life at a column of cotton-prices. He knew what that meant. There would be no telling his father. His father was "plang" (the family euphemism), and, as she had often done before, Tibby was finishing his work. She looked up at him and scowled. The work was never easy for her, she had to supply the gaps of her ignorance with guesses and was always in dread of guessing awry. Bennett sat down in the horsehair chair by the fireplace, under the blue-eyed portrait of his grandfather, the Scots minister, and rattled the money in his pocket. Tibby went on working. Much of Bennett's terror vanished and he broke into the scratching of her pen: "Tibby." "Eh?"