en the good and evil. Alston
had a vague uncomfortable besetment that his mother would have had a
warmer hope for him if he had been tempted of demons, tortured by
doubts. Then she would have bade him take refuge on heights, even have
dragged him there. But she knew he was living serenely on a plain.
Alston thought there ought to be some sympathy accorded men who liked
living on a plain.

"Good Lord!" said he, looking down at her and liking her better with
every word she said. "You scare me out of my boots. You're a firebrand
on a mountain."

"No," said his mother. "I'm a decent Addington matron with not a
hundredth part of a chance of jolting the earth unless you do it for me.
I can't jolt for myself because I'm an anti. There's Mary. Hear the ice
clink. I'll draw in my horns. Mary'd take my temperature."

Alston stayed soberly at home and read a book that evening, his nerves
on edge, listening for a telephone call. It did not come, but still he
knew Esther was willing him to her.

Esther sat by the window downstairs, in the dusk, in a fever of desire
to know what, since the afternoon, he was thinking of her, and for the
first time there was a little fleeting doubt in her heart whether she
could make him think something else. As to Alston, she had the
hesitations of an imperfect understanding. There were chambers where he
habitually dwelt, and these she never entered at all. His senses were
keenly yet fastidiously alive. They could never be approached save
through shaded avenues she found it dull to traverse, and where she
never really kept her way without great circumspection. The passion of
men was, in her eyes, something practically valuable. She did not go out
to meet it through an overwhelming impetus of her own. It was a way of
controlling them, of buying what they had to give: comforts and pretty
luxuries. She would have liked to live like an adored child, all her
whims supplied, all her vanities fed. And here in this little circle of
Addington Alston Choate was the one creature who could lift her out of
her barren life and give her ease at every point with the recognition of
the most captious world.

And she was willing him. As the evening wore on, she found she was
breathing hard and her wrists were beating with loathing of her own
situation and hatred of those who had made it for her, if she could
allow herself to think she hated. For Esther had still to preserve the
certainty that she was good. Madame