he had ever felt before. In the midst of this
gay crowd, of all this life and sunshine, a feeling of loneliness which
was almost fear--a feeling of being utterly adrift, cut off from all the
world--came over her; and she felt like one of her own plants, plucked up
from its native earth, with all its poor roots hanging bare, as though
groping for the earth to cling to. She knew now that she had lived too
long in the soil that she had hated; and was too old to be transplanted.
The custom of the country--that weighty, wingless creature born of time
and of the earth--had its limbs fast twined around her. It had made of
her its mistress, and was not going to let her go.

CHAPTER II

THE SON AND THE MOTHER

Harder than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle is it for a
man to become a member of the Stoics' Club, except by virtue of the
hereditary principle; for unless he be nourished he cannot be elected,
and since by the club's first rule he may have no occupation whatsoever,
he must be nourished by the efforts of those who have gone before. And
the longer they have gone before the more likely he is to receive no
blackballs.

Yet without entering into the Stoics' Club it is difficult for a man to
attain that supreme outward control which is necessary to conceal his
lack of control within; and, indeed, the club is an admirable instance of
how Nature places the remedy to hand for the disease. For, perceiving how
George Pendyce and hundreds of other young men "to the manner born" had
lived from their birth up in no connection whatever with the struggles
and sufferings of life, and fearing lest, when Life in her careless and
ironical fashion brought them into abrupt contact with ill-bred events
they should make themselves a nuisance by their cries of dismay and
wonder, Nature had devised a mask and shaped it to its highest form
within the portals of the Stoics' Club. With this mask she clothed the
faces of these young men whose souls she doubted, and called
them--gentlemen. And when she, and she alone, heard their poor squeaks
behind that mask, as Life placed clumsy feet on them, she pitied them,
knowing that it was not they who were in fault, but the unpruned system
which had made them what they were. And in her pity she endowed many of
them with thick skins, steady feet, and complacent souls, so that,
treading in well-worn paths their lives long, they might slumber to their
deaths in those halls where