indulged myself in that most delightful sort of impertinence,
which consists in the other person's not seeing it. "You wouldn't be
likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day.
But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution--Mr.
Mayrant would soon become quite--" I stopped myself on the edge of
something very clumsy.

But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me. "Yes, you mean that if he didn't
live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit
would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the
clever young donkeys of the minute."

"Maria!" Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.

Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology.
"I wasn't thinking of you at all!" she declared gayly; and it set me
doubting if perhaps she hadn't, after all, comprehended my impertinence.
"And, thank Heaven!" she continued, "John is one of us, in spite of his
present stubborn course."

But Mrs. Weguelin's beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that
disapproval I had come to know. To her, sociology and evolution and all
"isms" were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them
was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter
of youth. She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a
kind of lovely maternal gentleness:--

"We should not wish John to become radical."

In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined: hereditary
faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations
past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation. I saw her eyes
soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its
end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.

I addressed Mrs. Gregory. "By his 'present stubborn course' I suppose
you mean the Custom House."

"All of us deplore his obstinacy. His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly
expostulated with him. And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to
tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a
position which reflects ignominy upon us all."

I suppressed a whistle. I thought (as I have said earlier) that I
had caught a full vision of John Mayrant's present plight. But my
imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael's
act of discipline. This, it must have been, that the boy had checked
himself from telling me in the churchyard.