in the
Crevequers' vocabulary as culled second-hand from herself, and stored in
the same carefully treasured category with 'standpoint' and 'forceful.'
Not knowing this, she had really shown some self-sacrifice in taking her
risks. To minimize them she had laid stress on the purely aesthetic
protests that her taste made, leaving propriety aside. A certain
refinement she herself exacted from those whom she selected for
companionship--she began quite a long way off, in her anxiety for
impersonal detachment; how should Betty have grasped it?--and she would
have others exact it too. If youth is to lower the value of the precious
jewel, its friendship, bringing it down to common--very common--earth,
youth will inevitably be the poorer. There is, after all, something in
the belief so widely current about touching pitch.... To lounge about
the streets--to be exact, outside the doors of a theatre--at midnight,
in company with people of the stamp of Betty's companions of last
night----

'Gina?' Betty had wondered. 'And Luli? But----'

The mournful pondering of her eyes was rather inscrutable. It might
possibly refer to the Achievement of Intimate Contact, which must Shun
Nothing.

Mrs. Venables had suddenly at this point dropped the artist self to her
feet, and risen out of it for a moment entirely, becoming purely the
reputable, conventional, disapproving mother. She had said a most
_borne_ thing.

'It looked very strange last night. The Essingtons--the friends I was
with--did not know what to think.'

The allusion, with that, had seemed to her to have attained enough
personality to be safely left. The kernel of the matter, which, wrapped
up delicately in aesthetic abstractions, was, 'My son must not do that
sort of thing,' had been, in the speaker's eyes, almost too manifestly
reached. Mrs. Venables had meandered away among the wrappings. It might
have been necessary, but the consciousness of having said that anything
'looked very strange' had oppressed her. It had really been
uncharacteristic. The phrase, of such an immeasurable depth of
crudeness, must have been somewhere innate in her, passed down from a
long line of reputable ancestors, and it had leaped out without her
volition. She had endeavoured to retire from it, to wrap it up.

It was perhaps unfortunate for her that at the time she had quite
succeeded. Or, rather, the kernel of the thing, so extremely plain to
Mrs. Venables, had not been reached by Betty at