She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was glad if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time, he didn’t intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty years. He meant to know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene; afraid of twenty years’ emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the mango-seed in the fakir’s hands. “In ten minutes you eat the ripe mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was he going to suffer the other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all, she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to make him pay--well, he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so preposterous a situation. He leaned forward. “Things you couldn’t write? Or have you just funked it, on the way?” “Funked it?” Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word. “I mean--oh, I mean, let us talk straight. You’ve let it all go for more than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I’m a gentleman, I hope. I didn’t bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been easier never to have seen you at all.” “You’ve never wanted to see your mother?” Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn’t been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she was hitting below the belt. “What do you take me for? I’ve nearly died of--well, call it interest, more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother; likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I’ve grown perfectly used to it. And I know--I _know_ now, mind you--that you don’t care. Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me out. It’s too late, now, to make me care.” It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying, and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was some triumph in being able to say it now to her. Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger’s sudden kindness. “Were those years bad, Peter? I thought they’d be less bad if you began them very young. You see, they had to begin some time.” “Oh, they began--and they lasted. Now, they’re not bad at all. So why rake it all up now?” If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn’t have pressed the question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of wearing rouge, no doubt; this wasn’t pitiful in the least. He didn’t know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have sworn she didn’t need it.