"Yes," said Mrs. Choate. "She was tired. She's been rehearsing a dance with those French girls and their class." Alston lay back in his chair, regarding her with hot, tired eyes. He wanted to know what she thought of a great many things: chiefly whether a woman who had married Jeff Blake need be afraid of him. But there was a well-defined code between his mother and himself. He was not willing to trap her into honest answers where he couldn't put honest questions. "Mother," said he, and didn't know why he began or indeed that he was going to say just that at all, "do you ever wish you could run away?" She gave the corner of the book a pat with one beautiful hand. "I do run away," she said. "I was a good many miles from here when you came in. And I shall be again when you are gone. Among the rogues, such as we don't see." "What is it?" "Mysteries of Paris." "That's our vice, isn't it," said Alston, "yours and mine, novel reading?" "You're marked with it," said she. There was something in the quiet tone that arrested him and made him look at her more sharply. The tone seemed to say she had not only read novels for a long time, but she had had to read them from a grave design. "It does very well for me," she said, "but it easily mightn't for you. Alston, why don't you run away?" Alston stared at her. "Would you like to go abroad?" he asked her then, "with Mary? Would you like me to take you?" "Oh, no," said Mrs. Choate. "Mary wouldn't want to. She's bewitched with those French girls. And I don't want to. I couldn't go the only way I'd like." "You could go any way you chose," said Alston, touched. He knew there was a war chest, and it irked him to think his mother wouldn't have it tapped for her. "Oh, no," said she. "I should need to be slim and light, and put on short petticoats and ride horses and get away from tigers. I don't want to shoot them, but I'd rather like to get away from them." "Mother," said Alston, "what's come over you? Is it this book?" She laughed, in an easy good-humour. "Books don't come over me," said she. "I believe it's that old Madame Beattie." "What's Madame Beattie done that any--" he paused; Esther's wrongs at Madame Beattie's hands were too red before him--"that any lady would be willing to do?" "I really don't know, Alston," said his mother frankly. "It's only that when I think of that old party going out every night--" "Not every night." "Well, when she likes, and getting up on a platform and telling goodness knows what to the descendants of the oldest civilisations, and their bringing her home on their shoulders--" "No, no, mother, they don't do that." "I tell you what it makes me feel, Alston: it makes me feel _fat_." "Madame Beattie weighs twenty pounds more than you do, and she's not so tall by three inches."