His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling; but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make her dine here,” he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without being actually disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to ask what color _her_ shawl would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper, to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time, he found himself wondering--oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically wondering--why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was something--well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves--that kept him from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries--” he reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was: “If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the one person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the cuticle--all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow had your nerves, your physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein, prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of “science.” But to meet your mother in conditions like these was the real thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s literature,” thought Peter to himself, “and what is literature but just the very worst life can do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It _was_ rum.