"I agree with him," Rendel said, "that it would be just as difficult to get any idea of what human beings are about by looking down on them from a height, as it is for us to discover what insects are doing when we look down on them." "Yes, imagine looking at that," said Rachel, pointing towards the drawing-room. "You would see people walking up and down and in and out for no reason, and jostling each other round and round." "Yes," said Rendel. "How aimless it would look! Not more aimless than it is, after all," he added. "It amuses me, all the same," said Rachel, rather deprecatingly. "I mean, to come to a party of this kind every now and then; perhaps because I don't do it very often." "Why, don't you go out every night of your life in the season?" said Rendel; "I thought all young ladies did." "I don't," she said. "It isn't quite the same for me as it is for other people--at least, I mean that I have only my father to go out with;" and then, seeing in his face the interpretation he put on her words, she added, "my mother is an invalid, and we do not like to leave her too often." "Ah! but she is alive still," said Rendel, with a tone that sounded as if he understood what the contrary might have meant. "Oh yes," said Rachel quickly. "Yes, yes, indeed she is alive," in a voice that told the proportion that fact assumed in existence. "My mother died long years ago," said Rendel, in a lower voice. "Not so long, though, that I did not understand." Rachel looked at him with a soft light of pity flooding her face, and drawing the words out of him, he knew not how. "My father married again," he said, "while I was still a child--while I needed looking after, at least." "Oh," said Rachel, "you had a stepmother?" "Yes," he said, "I had a stepmother," and his face involuntarily became harder as he recalled that long stretch of loveless years--the father had never quite understood the shy and sensitive child--during which he had been neglected, suppressed, lonely, with no one to care that he did well at school and college, and that later he was getting on in the world, with no place in the world that was really his home. Then he went on after a moment: "And now my father is dead, too, so I am pretty much alone, you see." "How terrible it must be!" said Rachel softly. "How extraordinary! I can't quite imagine what it is like."