later consciously to his mother, and she
comforted him though he could not tell her why he needed it. She and
Mary were sitting on the back veranda, looking across the slope of the
river, doing nothing, because it was dusk, and dropping a word here and
there about the summer air and the night. Alston put down his hat and,
as he sat, pushed up his hair with the worried gesture both women knew.
Mary at once went in to get him a cool drink, her never-failing service,
and his mother turned an instant toward him expectantly and then away
again. He caught the movement. He knew she was leaving him alone.

"Mother," he said, "you never were disgusted through and through. With
yourself."

"Oh, yes," said she. "It's more or less my normal state. I'm disgusted
because I haven't courage. If I'd had courage, I should have escaped all
the things that make me bad company for myself now."

Alston, in his quickened mood, wondered what it was she had wanted to
escape. Was it Addington? Was it his father even, a courteous Addington
man much like what Alston was afraid he might be in the end, when he was
elderly and pottered down town with a cane? He hated to be what he was
afraid he inevitably must. It came upon him with renewed impetus, now
that he had left Esther with a faint disgust at her, and only a wearied
acquiescence in the memory that she had once charmed him. He wished he
were less fastidious even. How much more of a man he should have felt
if he had clung to his passion for her and answered Jeffrey with the
oath or blow that more elemental men found fitting in their rivalry.

"Mother," said he, "does civilisation rot us after all? Have we got to
be savages to find out what's in us?"

"Something seems to rot us round the edges," said the mother. "But
that's because there don't appear to be any big calls while we're so
comfortable. You can't get up in the midst of dinner and give a war-cry
to prove you're a big chief. It would be silly. You'd be surprised,
dear, to know how I go seething along and can't find anything to burn
up--anything that ought to be burned. Sometimes when Mary and I sit
crocheting together I wonder whether she won't smell a scorch."

He thought of the night when she had lain in bed and told how she was
travelling miles from Addington in her novel.

"You never owned these things before, mother," he said. "What makes you
now?"

"That I'm a buccaneer? Maybe because you've got to the same point
yoursel