Nona nodded. "Well, what's to be done: can you tell me?" "She mustn't go--we mustn't let her." "But if she stays--stays hating me?" "Oh, Jim, not _hating_--!" "You know well enough that she gets to hate anything that doesn't amuse her." "But there's the baby. The baby still amuses her." He looked at her, surprised. "Ah, that's what father says: he calls the baby, poor old chap, my hostage. What rot! As if I'd take her baby from her--and just because she cares for it. If I don't know how to keep her, I don't see that I've got any right to keep her child." That was the new idea of marriage, the view of Nona's contemporaries; it had been her own a few hours since. Now, seeing it in operation, she wondered if it still were. It was one thing to theorize on the detachability of human beings, another to watch them torn apart by the bleeding roots. This botanist who had recently discovered that plants were susceptible to pain, and that transplanting was a major operation--might he not, if he turned his attention to modern men and women, find the same thing to be still true of a few of them? "Oh Jim, how I wish you didn't care so!" The words slipped out unawares: they were the last she had meant to speak aloud. Her brother turned to her; the ghost of his old smile drew up his lip. "Good old girl!" he mocked her--then his face dropped into his hands, and he sat huddled against the armchair, his shaken shoulder-blades warding off her touch. It didn't last more than a minute; but it was the real, the only answer. He _did_ care so; nothing could alter it. She looked on stupidly, admitted for the first time to this world-old anguish rooted under all the restless moods of man. Jim got up, shook back his rumpled hair, and reached for a cigarette. "That's _that_. And now, my child, what can I do? What I'd honestly like, if she wants her freedom, is to give it to her, and yet be able to go on looking after her. But I don't see how that can be worked out. Father says it's madness. He says I'm a morbid coward and talk like the people in the Russian novels. He wants to speak to her himself--" "Oh, no! He and she don't talk the same language..." Jim paused, pulling absently at his cigarette, and measuring the room with uncertain steps. "That's what I feel. But there's _your_ father; he's been so awfully good to us; and his ideas are less archaic..." Nona had turned away and was looking unseeingly out of the window. She moved back hastily. "No!" He looked surprised. "You think he wouldn't understand either?" "I don't mean that... But, after all, it's not his job... Have you spoken to mother?" "Mother? Oh, she always thinks everything's all right. She'd give me a cheque, and tell me to buy Lita a new motor or to let her do over the drawing-room."