While she talked she looked about her, and the mother-softness began to die out of her eyes. Sarah Maitland had never seen her son's room; she saw, now, soft-green hangings, great bowls of roses, a sideboard with an array of glasses, a wonderfully carved ivory jar standing on a teak-wood table whose costliness, even to her uneducated eyes, was obvious. Suddenly she put on her spectacles, and still talking, rose, and walked slowly about the room glancing at the water-colors. By and by, just at the end of her harangue,--to which Blair had listened in complete silence,--she paused before a row of photographs on the mantelpiece; then, in the midst of a sentence, she broke off with an exclamation, leaned forward, and seizing a photograph, tore it in two, across the smiling face and the bare bosom, across the lovely, impudent line of the thigh, and flung it underfoot. "Shame on you! to let your mother see a thing like that!" "I didn't ask my mother to see it." "If you have thoughts like this," she said, "Elizabeth did well to throw you over for David." Blair lifted one eyebrow with a glimmer of interest. "Oh, David has got her, has he?" "At any rate, he's a _man!_ He doesn't live like this"--she made a contemptuous gesture; "muddling with silks and paintings, and pictures of bad women! What kind of a room is this for a man? Full of flowers and stinking jars, and cushions, and truck? It's more fit for a--a creature like that picture"--she set her heel on the smiling face; "than for a man! I ought never to have sent you here. I ought to have put you to puddling." She looked at him in growing agitation. "My God! Blair, what are you--living this way, with silks and perfumery and clay baby dolls? You've got no guts to you! I didn't mind your making a fool of yourself; that's natural; nobody can get to be a man till he's been a fool; but this--" She stood there, with one hand on the mantelpiece beside the row of photographs and bits of carving and little silver trinkets, and looked at him in positive fright. "And you are _my_ son," she said. The torrent of her angry shame suddenly swept Blair's manhood of twenty-four years away; her very power stripped him bare as a baby; it almost seemed as if she had sucked his masculinity out of him and incorporated it into herself. He stood there like a cringing schoolboy expecting to be whipped. "One of the men gave me that picture; I--" "You ought to have slapped his face! Listen to me: you are going to be looked after,--do you hear me? You are going to be watched. Do you understand?" She gathered up the whole row of photographs, innocent and offensive together, and threw them into the fire. "You are going to walk straight, or you are coming home, and going to work." It was a match to gunpowder; in an instant Blair's temper, the terrific temper of the uniformly and lazily amiable man, flashed into furious words.