Mrs. Quentin said to herself, "I didn't know how much he cared!" Aloud she murmured, "You must give her time." "Time?" "To move out the old prejudices and make room for new ones." "My dear mother, those she has are brand-new; that's the trouble with them. She's tremendously up-to-date. She takes in all the moral fashion-papers, and wears the newest thing in ethics." Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of his metaphor. "Is she so very religious?" "You dear archaic woman! She's hopelessly irreligious; that's the difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything: there's the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl's faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it's very hard to inspire her with confidence. She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it's her duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you're not obsolete, or whether the text isn't corrupt, or somebody hasn't proved conclusively that you never existed, anyhow." Mrs. Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of implications and assumptions where the lightest word may shake down the dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes more difficult between them than had their union been less close. Presently she ventured, "It's impossible?" "Impossible?" She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip and inflict a cut. "What she suggests." Her son, raising himself, turned to look at her for the first time. Their glance met in a shock of comprehension. He was with her against the girl, then! Her satisfaction overflowed in a murmur of tenderness. "Of course not, dear. One can't change--change one's life...." "One's self," he emended. "That's what I tell her. What's the use of my giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?" The psychological distinction attracted her. "Which is it she minds most?" "Oh, the paper--for the present. She undertakes to modify the point of view afterward. All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy: the gift of grace will come later." Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup. Her son's first words had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in the thick of a crowd that he could not see. It was horrible to feel herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if anything could have increased her misery it would have been the discovery that her ghosts had become visible. As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, "And you--?" His answer carried the shock of an evocation. "I merely asked her what she thought of _you_." "Of me?" "She admires you immensely, you know." For a moment Mrs. Quentin's cheek showed the lingering light of girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the transmitter's merit. "Well--?" she smiled. "Well--you didn't make my father give up the _Radiator_, did you?" His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: "She never comes here. How can she know me?"