er Madame de Malrive's answer was to be, there could be no
doubt as to her readiness to listen. She received Durham's words
without sign of resistance, and took time to ponder them gently
before she answered in a voice touched by emotion: "You are very
generous--very unselfish; but when you fix a limit--no matter how
remote--to my remaining here, I see how wrong it is to let myself
consider for a moment such possibilities as we have been talking
of."

"Wrong? Why should it be wrong?"

"Because I shall want to keep my boy always! Not, of course, in the
sense of living with him, or even forming an important part of his
life; I am not deluded enough to think that possible. But I do
believe it possible never to pass wholly out of his life; and while
there is a hope of that, how can I leave him?" She paused, and
turned on him a new face, a face in which the past of which he was
still so ignorant showed itself like a shadow suddenly darkening a
clear pane. "How can I make you understand?" she went on urgently.
"It is not only because of my love for him--not only, I mean,
because of my own happiness in being with him; that I can't, in
imagination, surrender even the remotest hour of his future; it is
because, the moment he passes out of my influence, he passes under
that other--the influence I have been fighting against every hour
since he was born!--I don't mean, you know," she added, as Durham,
with bent head, continued to offer the silent fixity of his
attention, "I don't mean the special personal influence--except
inasmuch as it represents something wider, more general, something
that encloses and circulates through the whole world in which he
belongs. That is what I meant when I said you could never
understand! There is nothing in your experience--in any American
experience--to correspond with that far-reaching family
organization, which is itself a part of the larger system, and which
encloses a young man of my son's position in a network of accepted
prejudices and opinions. Everything is prepared in advance--his
political and religious convictions, his judgments of people, his
sense of honour, his ideas of women, his whole view of life. He is
taught to see vileness and corruption in every one not of his own
way of thinking, and in every idea that does not directly serve the
religious and political purposes of his class. The truth isn't a
fixed thing: it's not used to test actions by, it's tested by them,
and made to