THERE might be nothing to keep him, but yet he stayed five days longer. For one thing George's children were amusing and a profitable study. They had discovered that they had only to lie to their parents to keep them quiet, and, as lying was expected of them, and made things comfortable, they saw no harm in it. For the rest they did as they pleased and amused themselves. Little George was the very spit of his grandfather and a great spinner of yarns. René told him one morning to ask his mother if he could go out with him. Off trotted the boy, to return in a moment with a detailed account of the conversation he had had. It transpired subsequently that Elsie was out at the time. René told her. She said: "I don't know what to do about the child. He has such an imagination." "I prefer to call that invention. Imagination is the one quality in you that appreciates truth. I should begin if I were you by satisfying his curiosity. Tell him the truth about anything he wants to know." "But he wants to know such awful things." "What awful things?" "Well, about me and George." "It's hard to put a lie straight once you've told it. It is terribly easy to lose your respect for your parents." "Oh, but little George loves us." "How do you know?" "He says so nearly every night." "Oh, well," said René, "people believe only what they like to believe." Elsie was rather ruffled: "After all, they're our children." "Certainly. You'll find out what they think of it soon enough." It was interesting to watch the processes which went to make up the fool's paradise that George and Elsie, in common with their kind, called Home, the worship of lip-virtue, the constant practice of mean little subterfuges, George dodging Elsie's interest and suspicion of himself, she his of her, and the children, where necessary, contributing to the comedy and, for the rest, living thoroughly, selfishly, and callously in their own pursuits. René found that as long as he would let George talk about bridge, bowls, and business, or splutter abuse of Radical legislation, and as long as he allowed Elsie to chatter of the neighbors and children and music-halls and clothes, they were both quite happy. With his mother it was otherwise. She was uneasy in his presence and they could hardly talk at all, except about their relations, the rich Fourmys, and the shabby tricks they had done; but after a while René became aware that they were holding a stealthy converse, an undercurrent to the words they used. He tried all sorts of devices to bring it to the surface but without success. His mother would relapse into silence or, without a word, would hurry off to her church and return impenetrably encased in humility, pale with emotional satiety. There was something abnormal about her then, something unnatural that made René's flesh creep. When it had passed he would feel once more the wildness in her that she kept so savagely repressed.