a leisurely tour through the Chateaux country.

Meanwhile Robin, according to his nurse, "was growing something
wonderful, and improving with his looks like nothing I ever see before,
and me with babies ever since I can remember anything as you may say,
a dear!" His immediate circle of wondering admirers was becoming almost
extensive, including, as it did, not only his mother and father, his
nurse, and the four servants at No. 5 Little Market Street, but also
Mrs. Leith senior, Bruce Evelin--now rather a lonely man--and Mr. Thrush
of John's Court near the Edgware Road.

At this stage of his existence, Rosamund loved Robin reasonably but with
a sort of still and holy concentration, which gradually impinged upon
Dion like a quiet force which spreads subtly, affecting those in its
neighborhood. There was in it something mystical and, remembering her
revelation to him of the desire to enter the religious life which had
formerly threatened to dominate her, Dion now fully realized the truth
of a remark once made by Mrs. Chetwinde about his wife. She had called
Rosamund "a radiant mystic."

Now changes were blossoming in Rosamund like new flowers coming up in
a garden, and one of these flowers was a beautiful selfishness. So Dion
called it to himself but never to others. It was a selfishness surely
deliberate and purposeful--an unselfish selfishness, if such a thing can
be. Can the ideal mother, Dion asked himself, be wholly without it? All
that she is, perhaps, reacts upon the child of her bosom, the child who
looks up to her as its Providence. And what she is must surely be at
least partly conditioned by what she does and by all her way of life.
The child is her great concern, and therefore she must guard sedulously
all the gates by which possible danger to the child might strive to
enter in. This was what Rosamund had evidently made up her mind to do,
was beginning to do. Dion compared her with many of the woman of London
who have children and who, nevertheless, continue to lead haphazard,
frivolous, utterly thoughtless lives, caring apparently little more for
the moral welfare of their children than for the moral welfare of their
Pekinese. Mrs. Clarke had a hatred of "things with wings growing out of
their shoulders." Rosamund would probably never wish their son to have
wings growing out of his shoulders, but if he had little wings on his
sandals, like the Hermes, perhaps she would be very happy. With winged
sandals he m