of her head and gave her trouble. She was always
pushing it up and repinning it into place, as if it were too heavy for
her small head.

"I wonder if there's anything to eat in the house," her son said.

"I wonder." They moved together toward the ice-box.

"Mother," said Pete, "that piece of pie has been in the ice-box at least
three days. Let's throw it away."

She took the saucer thoughtfully.

"I like it so much," she said.

"Then why don't you eat it?"

"It's not good for me." She let Wayne take the saucer. "What do you
know?" she asked.

She had adopted slang as she adopted most labor-saving devices.

"Well, I do know something new," said Wayne. He sat down on the kitchen
table and poured out his tea. "New as the garden of Eden. I'm in love."

"O Pete!" his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal
agony was in the tone. For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked
at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she
asked with a grin:

"Is it some one perfectly awful?"

"I'm afraid you'll think so. She's a sheltered, young, luxurious child,
with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most."

"O Pete!" she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn't, after all, as narrow
as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly,
"Well, tell me all about it."

Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows
on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket. He asked
himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind
about her. He even asked himself, as he had done once or twice before in
his life, whether her love for him implied the slightest dependence upon
his society. Wasn't it perfectly possible that his going would free her
life, would make it easier instead of harder? Every man, he knew, felt
the element of freedom beneath the despair of breaking even the tenderest
of ties. Some women, he supposed, might feel the same way about their
love-affairs. But could they feel the same about their maternal
relations? Could it be that his mother, that pure, heroic,
self-sacrificing soul, was now thinking more about her liberty than her
loss? Had not their relation always been peculiarly free? he found
himself thinking reproachfully. Once, he remembered, when he had been
working unusually hard he had welcomed her absence at