got over the lack of 'niceness' about those ploughs.

Going, as was the habit of Stanley's car, at considerable speed, Felix
was not at first certain whether the peculiar little squeezes his arm
was getting were due to the bounds of the creature under them or to some
cause more closely connected with his mother, and it was not till they
shaved a cart at the turning of the Becket drive that it suddenly dawned
on him that she was in terror. He discovered it in looking round just as
she drew her smile over a spasm of her face and throat. And, leaning out
of the car, he said:

"Drive very slowly, Batter; I want to look at the trees."

A little sigh rewarded him. Since SHE had said nothing, He said nothing,
and Clara's words in the hall seemed to him singularly tactless:

"Oh! I meant to have reminded you, Felix, to send the car back and take
a fly. I thought you knew that Mother's terrified of motors." And at his
mother's answer:

"Oh! no; I quite enjoyed it, dear," he thought: 'Bless her heart! She IS
a stoic!'

Whether or no to tell her of the 'kick-up at Joyfields' exercised his
mind. The question was intricate, for she had not yet been informed
that Nedda and Derek were engaged, and Felix did not feel at liberty to
forestall the young people. That was their business. On the other hand,
she would certainly glean from Clara a garbled understanding of the
recent events at Joyfields, if she were not first told of them by
himself. And he decided to tell her, with the natural trepidation of one
who, living among principles and theories, never quite knew what those,
for whom each fact is unrelated to anything else under the moon, were
going to think. Frances Freeland, he knew well, kept facts and theories
especially unrelated, or, rather, modified her facts to suit her
theories, instead of, like Felix, her theories to suit her facts.
For example, her instinctive admiration for Church and State, her
instinctive theory that they rested on gentility and people who were
nice, was never for a moment shaken when she saw a half-starved baby of
the slums. Her heart would impel her to pity and feed the poor little
baby if she could, but to correlate the creature with millions of other
such babies, and those millions with the Church and State, would not
occur to her. And if Felix made an attempt to correlate them for her
she would look at him and think: 'Dear boy! How good he is! I do wish he
wouldn't let that line come in his fo