en a good-looking gairl?"

Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately. "Richard has tried to
fall in love before, you know. And he has always chosen such stupid
women."

Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion
that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her,
and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other
women. Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.
"Why did he do that? Why did he do that?"

There appeared on Marion's face something that was like the ashes of
archness. Her heart said jubilantly to itself: "Why, because he loves
me, his mother, so far beyond all reason! Because he thinks me perfect,
the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women
who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he
can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me. So he went
to the other women, who plainly weren't competing with me; those who
were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds
with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the
soul. He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that
their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner. I
will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd
infatuation. I am the happiest woman in the world. And yet I know it was
not right it should be so. What is to happen to him when I die? And he
takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own. But
I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much
against my will, I've thrown over my son. And no other woman in the
world could have done it. You have all the qualities he loves in me, but
they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there
cannot possibly be any question of competition between us. You are
hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and
fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like
a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any
character outside my capacity for feeling. So he feels free to love you.
Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you." But because for many years she
had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free
speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in
late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises. So