And she had sat with him while he laboriously wrote the French and English of every tense and of every person in that tense. _That I might have been carrying. That thou mightest have been carrying_.... What a sleepy little boy she had tucked up that night! And next day he had come back to lunch with a woeful face to say that it was only the single line of principal tenses which had been set and that he had not liked to expose himself to the ridicule of his classmates by showing up his toilsome pages. "But how did you explain you had nothing to show your master?" "I said I'd left it at home, Mum, and he told me to bring it this afternoon. It won't take me hardly a minute to do." No, no, it was unimaginable that she should not be the mother of Richard: and, pleasant though it was to be sleeping alone in her old room, Richard belonged to Jemmie as much as to herself. Should she when at last she lay dying, for though the attempt to realize the inevitableness of death caught the breath and eluded the mind's grasp, the ultimate death of herself was a fact that must be believed, should she in that solemn hour ask a granddaughter--Richard's or dear fat Geoffrey's child--such questions as her own grandmother had asked her? Should she when an old woman look back at her life with doubt and forward to the grave with apprehension? And where now was the spirit of that cold body downstairs? Pleasant to be lying like this by oneself. Pleasant ... very pleasant ... the sheets cool and pleasant ... a delicious privacy. Yes, it was wrong not to tell girls more about the actualities of existence. Would she tell Muriel one day? That dear dumpling! But, almost before she knew it, Muriel would be thinking about marriage. In another ten years, only as long as she had been married, Muriel would be fifteen. Ten years went by quickly enough, especially when three of them were spent in having babies. And she might have another baby. Jemmie did not seem to mind. "The more the merrier," he would say, as he had so often said before. How insensitive men were. And gross. Men? What did she know about men? Jemmie looked so much like other men that he was probably representative of the sex. Pierre had been different. But would he have been different if she had married him? When she kissed him that afternoon, when she gave him that one swift kiss, she had not known to what such a kiss might not be the prelude. Would not the knowledge have destroyed all its fairy quality? Was it possible to experience romance unless one was innocent? Oh, that sweet illusion of first love! Even Grandmamma once upon a time must have known that. While she was lying there in that dusky room, did she feel faintly upon her withered lips some blushful kiss of sixty years ago? Did she, ah, did she, and was it for that she doubted her wisdom in persuading her granddaughter to marry Jemmie Alison? Anyway, the marriage was accomplished. There was no use now to repent.