mer than moonlight through half-open doors. If it had been
anyone else in the world that was coming towards her she would have
gathered up her thick plaits and pinned them about her head. But from
him she need not hide the signs, which made all other people hate her,
that she had been beautiful and had been destroyed.

When he came in she said, "Light the other gas-jets. Yes, both of them."

Now there was a lot of light. She could see the bird's-wing brilliance
of his hair, the faint bluish bloom about his lips, that showed he had
not shaved since morning, the radiance of his eyes and the flush on his
cheeks that had come of his enjoyed ride through the cold moony air. The
queer things men were, with their useless, inordinate, disgusting yet
somehow magnificent growth of hair on their faces, and their capacity
for excitements that have nothing to do with emotion....

He came and stood beside her and slipped his arm round her waist and
murmured, "Well, Marion?" and laughed. Always he had loved calling her
that, ever since as a little boy he had found her full name written in
an old book and had run to her, crying, "Is that really your lovely
name?" Even more than by the name itself had he been pleased by the way
it was written, squintwise across the page and in a round hand, exactly
as he himself was then writing his own name in his first school books.
It made him see his mother as a little girl, and helped him to dream his
favourite dream that he and she were just the same age and could go to
school and play games together. It still gave him an inexplicable glow
of pleasure, the memory of that brownish signature staggering across the
flyleaf of "Jessica's First Prayer."

She perceived that he was violently excited at coming back to her, but
she took the toast from under the grill, buttered it, set it on the warm
plate, and poured the eggs on it with an ironical air of absorption.
These two went very carefully and mocked each other perpetually so that
the gods should not overhear and be jealous. "Now, eat it while it's
hot!" she said, holding out the plate.

He put it down on the kitchen table and gathered her into his arms.

"Well, mother?" he murmured, looking down at her, worshipping her.

"Oh, my boy," she whispered, "you've lost your brown, up there in
Scotland."

"Oh, I'm all right. But you?"

"As well as well can be."

"But, mother dear, you look as if you'd been having those bad dreams."

"No, I've ha