On that particular morning she read the solid and conservative editorial in her favorite daily with cordial approval, and turned to the little heap of newspapers which had come in by yesterday’s late mail and were still in their wrappers. People were always sending her marked copies ... a glance here, a marginal note for her secretary there.... There was a very slim one which was addressed to her son and had been put with her mail by mistake. She wondered, grimly, who could be sending Peter a marked copy ... who could believe that he would be interested.... She was just putting it aside when she noticed that it bore the postmark of the old southern city where her husband--and now her son--owned a half interest in a cotton mill, and after an instant’s hesitation (but there was certainly nothing private in a newspaper!) she tore it open and--dividing her attention with her breakfast--began to read. Twenty minutes later she entered Peter’s suite with the sharpest of announcing raps and stood looking through the clever and attractive room to the sleeping porch beyond where a motionless figure lay at ease in a brilliant blue bed. “Peter!” she said sharply, but the silent form did not even quiver, and she marched upon him with her short, decisive steps and stood looking down at him. It was almost a year since her only son who was likewise her only child had reached the age of twenty-one, and had legally, at least, become a man, but sleeping there in his bright blue pajamas which perfectly matched the enamel of the bed and its very decorative spread, his fair head pillowed on one up-flung arm, he gave decidedly more the effect of fourteen. “And I believe he _is_ fourteen, essentially,” his mother reflected unhappily. She was in the habit of talking learnedly about juvenile delinquents who were, perhaps, chronologically sixteen, biologically twenty, and psychologically only eight, but it was not until this hour of shame and chagrin that she was willing to include her own offspring in that stern classification.