She shut the door, and the one-sided conversation was too subdued to interrupt Geoffrey's thoughts. They were entirely pleasant. His marriage satisfied him mentally and delighted him physically. His occasional fierce quarrels with Helen seemed mere surface disturbances; they did not affect in the slightest their mutual love, though they undoubtedly eradicated in Geoffrey any tendency towards complacency. He lay stretched out luxuriously on the sofa, and looking back, found that the storms and agonies that had preceded his engagement were dim in his memory. They belonged to a stage that was definitely over. Helen came back into the studio, her eyes dancing. "You needn't tell me," said Geoffrey, "I can see by your face that you've been talking to mother. What's she done now?" "Oh, Geoffrey, it really is gorgeous. She's got the most perfect idea. You know Hugh and Jessica are coming back on Tuesday? Well, she proposes to have a party the Friday after for your grannie and great-aunt Sarah and aunt Dora and Jessica and me. All six of us do you see? And such husbands as there are, naturally." "It sounds monstrous. Must we go?" "Of course we must, and it isn't monstrous at all. I do wish you appreciated your mother; she'll be at her best stage-managing a thing like that. It will be a perfect puppet show; she'll pull the wires and we'll dance." "Darling, why do you dance? Is it pure malice?" "No it isn't. A little bit, yes. I do love to see how far she'll go. When we talk about art, for instance, I give her cues to see if she'll take them, and she does every time. Out she trots the same old clichés; it never fails. But mostly it's because I really admire her; she's so consistently unreal, she isn't a person at all, she's a peg hung with old worn out conventions and traditions, and yet she comports herself as if she were more real than any one else in the world." "I'm her son; am I unreal too?" Geoffrey asked soberly. "My darling, you're not." Helen stood away from him, looking down at him serenely, her hands clasped loosely in front of her, her manner serious. "You're real to me, just as I expect she and your father are real to each other. I'm an individualist. I suppose I'm what people would call temperamental, but I'm not entirely imbecile. I appreciate quite clearly that I have an enormous lot in common with your mother. As regards the ordinary practical things of life we do just the same as your parents did. I don't mean only things like marrying, and having children, and dying. But we're the product of the same education and very much the same kind of home. We have the same income, and move in much the same set. The differences between us are mainly superficial and illusionary. Your mother, for instance, has an illusion about motherhood and all that, and I have one about art, but we're both in the tradition of suitable wives for the male Greene."