The mother turned round with an air of expostulation. "I’m sure I can’t see what you want to make of your life. You seem to have no ideals, not any more than Bob. You’re not pretty, but you’re not ugly; and you’ve a kind of witchiness most pretty girls have to do without. If you’d only dress with some decency and make the best of yourself, you could take as well as any other girl." "Yes; if the game was worth the candle." "But surely _some_ game is worth the candle." "Oh, certainly; only, not this one, of taking—in the way you seem to think girls want to take." "Some girls do." "Oh, some girls, of course—only, not—not my kind." "But what _is_ your kind? That’s what I can’t understand." The girl smiled—a dim, distant, rather wistful smile that merely fluttered on the lips and died like a feeble light. "And that’s what I can’t explain to you, mother darling." "Are we so far apart as that?" "We’re not far apart at all. It’s only that I’m myself, while you want me to be a continuation of you." "I don’t want anything but what will make for your happiness." "My happiness as you see it for me—not as I see it for myself." "But you’re my child, Edith. I can’t be without hopes for you." Another dim, quickly dying smile was the only answer to this as Edith picked up her racket from the teakwood chair and moved toward the house. On a note that would have been plaintive had it not been so restrained, Mrs. Collingham continued: "Edith darling, I don’t think there’s been a moment since you were born when I haven’t dreamed of a brilliant future for you, and now—" "But, oh, mother dear, what’s the use of a brilliant future, as you call it, when your whole soul is set on something else?" The lioness mother was roused. "But it shouldn’t be set on something else. That’s what I resent. Don’t think for a minute that your father and I mean to stand by and see you throw yourself away." "I didn’t know there was any question of my doing that." "That boy will never be anything better than a university professor—never in this world; and if it comes to our forbidding it, forbid it we shall without hesitation." The girl’s head was flung up. Boredom and indifference passed out of the strange eyes. For an instant the conflict of wills seemed about to break out into mutual challenge. It was Edith who first regained enough mastery of self to say, quietly. "You surely wouldn’t take that responsibility—whatever I did." The soft answer having warned the mother of the danger of collision, she subsided to an easier, if a more fretful, tone. "And Bob’s such a worry, too. If your father knew about this Follett girl, I think he would go wild." "But we don’t know anything ourselves—beyond the few hints dropped by Hubert Wray which I’m sure he didn’t mean." "Well, I’m worried. It’s the war, I suppose. If he’d only settle down to work—" "He won’t settle down till he marries; and if he marries, it will have to be some girl he’s in love with."