"Why, yes, of course I'm sincere. So are they. Only, doesn't it occur to
you they're having just as much fun organising and stirring the pot as
if it was the other pot they were stirring? Besides they attitudinise
while they stir, and say they're womanly. And they like that, too."

"Do you think they're in it for the game?"

"No, no, Alston, not consciously. Nobody's in it for the game except
your Weedon Moores. Any more than a nice girl puts on a ribbon to trap
her lover. Only nature's behind the girl, and nature's behind the game.
She's behind all games. But as to the antis--" said Mrs. Choate
impatiently, "they've gone on putting down cards since the rules were
changed."

Alston rose and stood looking down at her. She glanced up brightly, met
his eyes and laughed.

"All is," said she, in a current phrase even cultured Addington had
caught from its "help" from the rural radius outside, "I just happened
to feel like telling you if you want to run away, you go. And if I
weighed a hundred and ten and were forty-five, I'd go with you.
Actually, I should advise you, if you're going to stay here, to stir
the pot a little now it's begun to boil so hard."

"Get into politics?" he asked, remembering Jeff.

"Maybe."

She smiled at him, pleasantly, not as a mother smiles, but an implacable
mistress of destiny. In spite of her large tolerance, there were moments
when she did speak. So she had looked when he said, as a boy, that he
shouldn't go to gymnasium, and she had told him he would. And he went.
Again, when he was in college and had fallen in with a set of
ultra-moderns and swamped himself in decoration and the beguilements of
a spurious art, he had seen that look; then she had told him the
classics were not to be neglected. Now here was the look again. Alston
began to have an uncomfortable sense that he might have to run for
office in spite of every predilection he ventured to cherish. He could
have thrown himself on the floor and bellowed to be let alone.

"But keep your head, dear," she was saying. "Keep your head. Don't let
any man--or woman either--lose it for you. That's the game, Alston,
really."

It was such a warm impetuous tone it brought them almost too suddenly
and too close together. Alston meant to kiss her, as he did almost every
night, but he awkwardly could not. He went out of the room in a shy
haste, and when he dropped off to sleep he was thinking, not of Esther,
but of his mother. Even so h