all heard what Angela said last night in her little address to the
committee in the dark. I don't know why she addressed her remarks
particularly at me, but as she did so, there is no secret in the matter.
Of course, just at first, it seemed dretful to me that any one should
know or speak about it. I cannot understand how you knew, Angela; I am
trying not to understand...."

She took up a thin captain biscuit and bit it absent-mindedly. It
trembled in her hand like a leaf.

"Yes, it is true that Rrchud isn't like other women's boys. You know it,
Meta. Angela evidently knows it, and--at least since yesterday--I know
that I know it. His not being able to read or write--I always knew in my
heart that my old worn-out tag--'We can't all be literary
geniuses'--didn't meet the case. His way of disappearing and never
explaining.... Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys,
doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with
hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever
had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy. Well, then, as
you know, he couldn't get a commission, couldn't even get his stripe,
poor darling. He deserted twice--pure absence of mind--it was always the
same from a child--'I wanted to see further,' he'd say, and of course
worse in the trenches. Why, you know it all, Angela dear--at least,
perhaps not quite all. I should like to tell you--because you said that
about the splendour of being the mother of Rrchud....

"Pinehurst--my husband, he is a doctor, you know--had that same passion
for seeing further. He was often ill in London. I said it was asthma,
but he said it was not being able to see far enough. We were in America
for Rrchud's birth, and Pinehurst insisted on going West. I took the
precaution of having a good nurse with me. Pinehurst said the East was
full of little obstacles, and people's eyes had sucked all the secrets
out of the horizon, he said. I like Cape Cod, but he said there was
always a wall of sea round those flat wet places. We stayed in a
blacksmith's spare room on the desert of Wyoming, but even that horizon
seemed a little higher than we, and one clear day, in a pink sunrise, we
saw something that might have been a dream, my dears, and might have
been the Rockies. Pinehurst couldn't stand that, we pushed west--so
tahsome. We climbed a little narrow track up a mountain, in a light
buggy that a goldminer lent us. Oh, of cour