“The marriage was not a happy one. My father was dull, stubborn, and had ideas as orthodox as himself on the subject of home rule. He was thrown from his horse and killed when I was seven. After that she devoted herself entirely to me—her parents died soon after she married—and recovered all her old buoyancy and joy of life. Of course she had other offers of marriage, and many friends; but although she liked society and was too sane to hate an entire sex because one man had failed her, she was too happy in her freedom and her child to be tempted for a moment. She entertained enough to give the atmosphere of my home a certain gayety and to initiate me into the ways of the minor world. I went to boarding-school when the proper time came, for she was too wise to run the risk of feminizing me, but I spent my vacations with her—we traveled a good deal—and when I left Harvard and returned home with the intention of adopting the profession of letters, she became my constant companion and spoiled me for anyone else. She had a wide range of interests, in life as well as in books—in which she had taken refuge during my father’s régime—and magnificent spirits——” “Well, those I haven’t got, at all events. I’ve felt blue or cross most of my life.” “I saw you dancing in the woods. You looked sixteen—no, ageless. . . . Your spirits were in constant conflict with your luck and boiled over into the wrong channels. If you had been commonplace your unhappy experience would have made little impression on you.” “Well, it made a lot, and if you care to hear it I’ll tell you something about my own mother.” He leaned over and emptied the ashes of his pipe into the lake. When he turned to her his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed, but his expression betrayed nothing more than kindly interest. “Please do,” he said warmly. “One confidence deserves another. I’ve heard scraps—you are a much-discussed young person, you know—and I’m keen to hear the story at first hand.” “You’ll not put me in a book!” There was a very faint note of alarm in her voice, and she experienced another titillation at the possibility. “If you really do not want to be ‘put in a book’ you are even more original than you look. But suppose we defer introducing anything so extraneous to the moment as fiction? I certainly should not take such a liberty without your consent after you had given me your confidence. Just now I am only interested in discovering what has made you so different from Bladina.”