long
before he answered her, while his face had become set, and showed
colourless as wax against the surrounding crimson of the room.

"Oh, the home!" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders just perceptibly.
"It doesn't amount to very much. My mother in her dear unwisdom of
faith and hope magnifies the value of it. It's just an idle man's fad."

"A fad with an uncommon amount of backbone to it, apparently."

"That depends on its eventual success. It's a thing to be judged not by
intentions but by results."

"What made you think of it?"

Richard looked full at her, spreading out his hands, and again
shrugging his shoulders, slightly. Again Miss St. Quentin accused
herself of a defect of tact.

"Isn't it rather obvious why I should think of it?" he asked. "It
seemed to me that, in a very mild and limited degree, it was calculated
to meet a want."--He smiled upon her, quite sweet-temperedly, yet once
more there was a flavour of irony in his tone.--"Of course hideous
creatures and disabled creatures are an eyesore. We pity, but we look
the other way. I quite accept that. They are a nuisance, since they are
a standing witness to the fact that things, here below, very far from
always work smoothly and well, and that there are disasters beyond the
power of applied science to put right. The ordinary human being doesn't
covet to be forcibly reminded of that by means of a living object
lesson."

Richard shifted his position, clasped his hands behind his head. He had
begun speaking without idea of self-revelation, but the relief of
speech, after long self-repression, took him, goading him on. Old
strains of feeling, kept under by conscious exercise of will, asserted
themselves. He asked neither sympathy nor help. He simply called from
off those shallows and sand-bars laid bare by the ebbing tide of his
first enthusiasm. He protested, wearied by the spiritual dryness which
had caused all effort to prove so joyless of late. To have sought
relief in words before his mother would have been unpardonable, he
held. She had borne enough from him in the past, and more than enough.
But to permit it himself in the presence of this young, strong, capable
woman of the world, was very different. She came out of the swing of
society and of affairs, of large interests in politics and in thought.
She would go back into those again very shortly, so what did it matter?
She captivated him and incensed him alike. His relation to her had been