Katherine’s cheeks flushed. “That’s unkind, Mother!” she cried. Her voice grew harder. “Please don’t say anything about Philip unless you must. It makes everything very difficult. I know that you don’t like him. You see him strangely, you put him in the wrong whatever he does. But, Mother,” her voice softened again. “It isn’t that. We can’t alter that. Phil will never be at his best at Garth—not as things are now. But if we were married. Oh! you would see how fine things would be!” Her voice was eager, excited now. “He would be happy and quite, quite different with everyone. I know him. He depends so much—too much—on what people think of him. He knows that you don’t like him, and that makes him embarrassed and cross—at his worst. But he’s splendid, really, he is, indeed, and you’d see it if we were married and this horrid engagement were over. He’s fine in every way, but he’s different from us—he’s seen so much more, knows life that we can’t know, has other standards and judgments. Everyone can’t be like us, Mother. There _must_ be people who want different things and think different things. Why should he be made into something like us, forced to think as we do?... Mother, let us be married soon, at once, perhaps, and then everything will be right—” She stopped, breathless then, in her eagerness, bent down and kissed her mother’s cheek. But Mrs. Trenchard’s cheek was very cold. “Your father said a year,” she answered, counting her stitches, “four, five, six—Yes, a year. And you agreed to that, you know.” Katherine turned, with a sharp movement, away, clenching her hands. At that moment she hated her mother, hated with a hot, fiery impulse that urged her to leave the room, the house, the family at that very instant, flinging out, banging the door, and so settle the whole affair for ever. Mrs. Trenchard made no sound. Her needles clicked. Then she said, as though she had been looking things over: