"Mother, don't squirm! You know just as well as I do that she doesn't want me to stay with them. Why not?" She did not wait for an answer, which, indeed, her mother could not immediately find. "Well, Heaven knows I'm not pining to be with her! I shall run in to-morrow morning, and tell her that Mrs. Newbolt asked me to stay with her.... Mother, how _could_ Maurice have fallen in love with Eleanor?" Her voice trembled; she went over to the window and stood looking down into the street; her hands were clenched behind her, and her soft young chin was rigid. "He was just a boy," she said; her eyes were blurring so that the street was a gray fog; "how _could_ Eleanor?" It seemed as if her own ardent, innocent body felt the recoil of Maurice's youth from Eleanor's age! She thought of that dark place in his past, which she had accepted with pain, but always with defending excuses; she excused him again, now, in her thoughts: "Eleanor was _impossible_! That's why somebody else ... caught him. And it was long ago. And Eleanor's old enough to be his mother. He never could have loved her!" Suddenly she had a fleeting, but real, pity for Eleanor: "Poor thing!" Aloud she said, huskily, over her shoulder, "If she had really loved him, she wouldn't have done such a terrible thing as marry him." Mrs. Houghton, reading the evening paper, said, briefly, "She loves him _now_, my dear." "Oh!" Edith said, passionately, "sometimes I am sorry for Eleanor--and then the next minute I perfectly hate her!" "She was only forty when she married him," Mary Houghton said; "that isn't old at all! And I have always been sorry for her." She looked up over her spectacles at the tense young figure by the window, outlined against the yellow sunset; saw those clenched hands, heard the impetuous voice break on a word,--and forgot Eleanor in a more intimate anxiety: "Of course," she said, "such a difference in age as there is between Maurice and Eleanor is a pity. But Maurice is devoted to her, and with reason. She has been generous when he has been unkind. I happen to know that." "Maurice couldn't be unkind!" Her mother ignored this. "And remember another thing, Edith: It isn't years that decide whether a marriage is a failure. One of the happiest marriages I ever knew was between a woman of fifty and a man of thirty. You see--" she paused, and took off her spectacles, and tapped the arm of her chair, thoughtfully: "You see, Edith, you don't understand. You are so appallingly young! You think Love speaks only through the senses. My dear, Love's highest speech is in the Spirit; the language of the senses is only it's pretty, stammering, divine baby-talk!" Edith was silent. Her mother went on: "Yes, it isn't age that decides things. It's selfishness or unselfishness. At present Eleanor is extraordinarily unselfish, so I believe they may yet be very happy."