Mrs. Maitland, her rusty bonnet very much on one side, watched them go; then she closed the door behind them, and stood looking at her son who was still holding the corkscrew in his hands. Her feet were planted firmly wide apart, her hands were on her hips; her eyebrow was lifting ominously. "Well?" she said; with the echo of that golden voice still in her ears, her own voice was, even to herself, unexpectedly mild. "I didn't expect you," Blair managed to say. "I inferred as much," she said dryly; "so this is the way you keep up with your classes?" "There are no lectures at this time of day," he said. "If you had been so kind, my dear mother, as to let me know you were coming"--he spoke with that exaggerated and impertinent politeness that confesses fright; "I would have met you. Instead of that, you--you--you burst in--" he was getting whiter and whiter. The thought that the men had seen the unkempt figure, the powerful face, the straggling locks of hair, the bare hands,--seen, in fact, the unlovely exterior of a large and generous nature, a nature which, alas, he, her son, had never seen; that they had seen her, and guessed, of course, that she was his mother, was positively unendurable to Blair. He tried to speak, but his voice shook into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic insult to motherhood. "I've no fault to find with your friends being here, if they don't interfere with your studies," Mrs. Maitland said. "Oh," he said rather blankly; then his shame of her stung him into fury: "why didn't you tell me that you--" "I've been to see the Dean," she said; "sit down there and listen to me. Here, give me a chair; not that pincushion thing! Give me a chair fit for a man to sit on,--if you've got one in this upholstery shop." Blair, with trembling hands, pushed a mahogany chair to her side. He did not sit down himself. He stood with folded arms and downcast eyes. She was not unkind; she was not even ungentle. She was merely explicit: _he was a fool_. All this business,--she pointed to the bottle and the empty glasses; all this business was idiotic, it was a boy's foolishness. "It shows how young you are, Blair," she said kindly, "though the Lord knows you are old enough in years to have some sense!" But if he kept the foolishness up, and this other tomfoolery on account of which she had had to leave the Works and spend her valuable time talking to the Dean, why, he might be expelled. He would certainly be suspended. And that would put off his getting into business for still another year. "And you are twenty-four!" she said.