This was a transition, too, leading her to speak of Bob’s affairs in the tone of one who, though puzzled, takes them sympathetically. "And yet I think it’s enlarging. Though we’ve kept only on the outer edge of the drama through which Bob has been going with the girl he’s married, the whole thing has deepened his life so much that it couldn’t help deepening ours. It’s broadened us, too, I think, giving us an insight into lives so different from our own. That’s what we need so much, it seems to me, that kind of broadening. It’s going to solve a lot of our national problems which at present seem to be insoluble. Yes; Bob is still at home with us, and I tell you frankly that I don’t know what is coming out of it. It’s all so queer and independent and modern. I’m old-fashioned, and I don’t pretend to see through these young people’s ways. But I’m Bob’s mother, and through all his developments—and he _is_ developing—I’m going with him." So Junia talked, and talked so much that she was in danger of talking herself round. The instinct to be in the front line of fashion had something to do with it, but self-persuasion had more. The thing of the hour being the throwing over of the old social code, Junia wouldn’t have been Junia if she hadn’t done it; but, even so, the creeping-in of compunction toward Bob took her by surprise. She had told herself hitherto that she loved him so much that she would work for his permanent happiness even at the cost of his temporary pain; but now she began to fear that what had seemed to her his temporary pain might prove the very life of his life. She came to this perception through reading in the newspapers the accounts of the Follett boy’s trial. By the tacit convention which the Collinghams had established, that they had nothing to do with it, she never spoke of it to Bradley or Edith, nor did they speak of it to her; but she kept herself informed, and knew the devotion with which Bob gave himself to Jennie and her family. The boy’s condemnation hit her hard. When Bradley came home that night, she saw that it had also hit him. "I’m worth about five million dollars at a guess," he confided to her, "and I’d cheerfully have given four of them if this thing hadn’t happened." "But, Bradley dear, you had nothing to do with it." "I know I hadn’t," he declared, savagely; "and yet I’d—I’d do as I say." But it wasn’t Bradley she was most sorry for; nor was it for the Follett boy. She was sorry that, because of conditions which she herself had fostered, Bob would never reap the fruit of a love in which he had been so chivalrous. She didn’t see how he could. Just as there was a natural Bradley and a standardized one, so there was a natural and a standardized Junia. The natural Junia had long seemed dead; but the bigness of the love which she saw daily and hourly exemplified moved her to the painful stirrings of new life. Meanwhile Bob went with Teddy up the remaining steps by which he mounted his Calvary.