‘Dear little Jim!’ said Gundred, smiling affectionately. Her son was fifteen, and rather unusually large for his age. But no size, no age could ever have cured his mother of talking and thinking of him as a little child. She had all the good woman’s utter, tragic inability to understand that her child becomes a boy and a man. Her Jim was still a baby. Of the real Jim she knew nothing whatever. Their relations were sometimes strained already, and in the future the strain would become fiercer and more unceasing, through Gundred’s idea of ruling the adolescent Jim by ideas that applied to the only Jim she had ever known--the kilted, white-frocked creature of the nursery, who had passed out of existence at least ten years ago. ‘Then that is settled,’ replied Kingston happily. ‘I’ll take Jim your love, Gundred. Anything else to send him?’ The father was always giving the boy presents. Anything that took his fancy he had a habit of buying for Jim. Gundred, no less affectionate, considered such indulgence spoiling and undesirable. She did not think it quite suitable to be so lavish, and her generosity was restricted to the orthodox seasons of Christmas and the birthday. ‘My love, of course, dear,’ she replied, with a momentary primming of her lips; ‘and tell him how much I hope that he reads the little book I gave him on his birthday. Say that he will find it the greatest help. I myself have got the most wonderful comfort from it; the prayers seem to suit one so perfectly, and the hymns for each day are so uplifting and helpful.’ Kingston, secretly unsympathetic towards Gundred’s habit of collecting small devotional works and showering them round upon her near relations, glided hastily away from the topic. Sincerely pious and devout herself, she made the common mistake of wishing to impose her own precise form of devotion on everyone else, and could not conceive it possible that any right-minded person should not derive as great a benefit as she did from her little pietistic volumes. To her son, in particular, she talked religion with that terrible intimate candour which the good woman feels to be so natural, and the normal man feels to be so horribly irreverent. From his mother, then, the boy shrank and hid himself, outraged in all his most intimate feelings of decency by the freedom with which she discoursed to him of God and Heaven and Good, and half a hundred secret, private matters that nothing would have induced him to discuss even with his dearest friend. Kingston ordered the motor, glad of an opportunity for escaping Gundred’s evangelistic activities. She herself made a faint pretence at deploring her inability to accompany him.