"He was always talking about feeling things the same as you. There was a lot of good in your father though his own people would never admit it, and mine could never see it---- But it's no good talking. It's all done." "He left you." "A boy like you can't judge a man." "Oh, but I know." "You can't get anything for the like of that out of books. There's some men can stay with a woman and some can't, and which you'll be you'll know when you come to it." René stared at his mother. She looked very small, sitting there by the empty fireplace. She seemed to be talking to him from a great distance away, from beyond the Something which he had always felt to be in life. In the glade in Scotland he had thought to have surmounted it, but now, when he thought of it, that had already dwindled away and become as small and rounded as that memory of his father which had haunted him in his waiting. Cathleen seemed so remote that he was alarmed. The foundations of omnipotent everlasting love were undermined! Worst of all, he knew that it had become impossible to talk of her. Not even her image in his mind could dwell in that house. And his mother--his mother was saying horrible, worldly things in a thin, weary voice. In fierce rebellion his innocence rose up against her. It was impossible for him to admit a fall from grace. Either you loved or you did not. If you loved, it was forever. If you did not, then you were damned past all hope; at least you were, if you were a man. All women were _Dulcineas_ to this _Quixote_. So moved was he, so distressed, that he lost the sequence of his thoughts, and they pursued their careers in his head regardless of his comfort or immediate needs. He was left inarticulate. "You'll catch all the flies in the house in your mouth if you don't close it," said his mother. He snapped his teeth together, and said fiercely: "All the same, if I treated a woman as my father treated you, I'd shoot myself." "Absurd you are. A man needs a fair conceit of himself to do that. And can't a woman learn to have a life of her own?" "Women----" began René, but his mother cut him short in a soothing voice that was almost a caress: "Keep that for the young ones, my dear. I'm too old to be told what women are and are not, or to care. Shall we have the shortbread for tea? George is to be in with Elsie." "Who's Elsie?" "Didn't I tell you? George is going to be married." "George is?" "Yes." Mrs. Fourmy gave a chuckle that for so tiny a woman was surprisingly large. "Yes, George has been almost as good at falling in love as you." That bowled René middle-stump, and he went out to bring in his bag and unpack the shortbread and the Shetland jacket he had bought in Inverness for his mother. She tried it on and preened herself in it. "Smart I am. You're a kind boy to me. Do you remember how you two boys used to say when you were grown up you would be rich and take me to my old home in Wiltshire? George won't, now he's going to be married."