“I’m not trying to do that. If I’ve come so late, it’s because I feel quite sure that it’s too late to undo any of it. I am not trying”--her brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal tradition--“to get a single claw into you. I’ve come to pay damages, Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me. I’m not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me.” “I don’t want to be anything but polite,” murmured Peter, abashed. “And the freer you really are, the more it’s up to you to play the game, don’t you think?” She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might almost have worn a fluffy gray shawl. “I am sure you don’t wish to be anything but polite,” she brought out, still vaguely. “But--I’ve odd things to say, and I’ve come a long way to say them; and you, my son, must listen.” “It’s what I’m here for.” “_Evidemment._ How much has Spencer Martin told you?” “Old Martin? Nothing at all, ever--except the figure of my allowance.” “Not why we first went to Hawaii?” “Good Lord, no! I might have been a foundling.” “You didn’t ask?” She had taken off her gray glove; and pushed her veil up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers. “No,” answered Peter curtly. “A fellow wouldn’t ask. You can see that.” She seemed to muse. “He would have told you that, I think, if you had. There was no reason why you shouldn’t know.” “I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn’t know, you’d have seen to it that I was told.” “So you thought there was something disgraceful--something that drove us out of America?” “It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old Martin himself was a kind of proof that there wasn’t.” “There wasn’t.” She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically affirmative tone. “No, Peter, not that.” She paused for a moment, staring out into the gray street. “These women are very ugly, aren’t they?” she asked irrelevantly. “On the boat, they were horrors. And they jerked about so--_did_ so many things. Do the men like them that way?” Her tone was desultory.