“No,” said Effie softly, “not now.” She stole a look of shy, glad confidence at Sam, and he found it extraordinarily difficult to meet her eye, and still more difficult to say what he must, at any cost, get said. “I’m not so sure,” he said at last, wishing the earth would swallow him. At that moment he would cheerfully have given a hand to escape having to differ from them. They were Effie and his mother: they were his mother and Effie: the two women to whom he owed everything: more, he loved Effie so that every fibre in him yearned for her, and, even more than that, he was delicately sensitive to Effie in her present case. But it couldn’t change him. His loyalty was engaged, to fanaticism, to another Effie, high Effie of the hills, of the crusade and the idea; and this seemed to him somehow, a lower Effie, an Effie who had dipped the flag of her ideal to a coming baby, whilst he was faithful to the old unbending Effie who had thrown an imitation wedding ring away. It almost seemed as if she wanted that ring back, base metal though it was. A case, perhaps, of splitting hairs, but, at any rate, the case of a man with a faith at one extreme and at the other his miserable conviction that happiness was not for him. He had abandoned happiness when he left Marbeck, and lived now in a place where happiness was barred by Ada. “I’m not so sure,” he repeated drearily. “You see, there’s Ada and I have to be fair to her.” “Ada’s left you,” snapped Anne. A contentious Sam was not going to find her amiable. He chose to put it in another way. “My wife,” he said, “is staying at present with her father. Yes, mother,” he went on firmly, “I’m going to be fair to Ada and I’ve to guard against unfairness all the more because you won’t be fair. You won’t be ordinarily just. You always hated Ada.” “Yes,” she agreed viciously. “I’m a clean woman. I always hated vermin.” Sam turned to Effle immensely heartened by this virulence. “You see!” he appealed, calling to witness the hopeless bias of his mother. It was, he wished to imply, this blind hatred of Anne for Ada which accounted for his mother’s attitude, her exalting of--well--the mistress over the wife, her flagrant unmorality. He tried to put all this into his gesture. “And you,” he reinforced it, “you sent me to her, Effie.” She bowed her head, admitting it, but Anne was not prepared to let it go at that. “Even Effie,” she said “can make a mistake. She would not send you now.”