are most modest. All I ask is
to live among human beings with whom I have half an idea in common--men
who sometimes raise their noses from the ground, instead of eternally
scheming how to line their pockets, reckoning human progress solely in
terms of l.s.d. No, I've sacrificed enough of my life to this country.
I mean to have the rest for myself. And there's another thing, my
dear--another bad habit this precious place breeds in us. It begins by
making us indifferent to those who belong to us but are out of our
sight, and ends by cutting our closest ties. I don't mean by distance
alone. I have an old mother still living, Mary, whose chief prayer is
that she may see me once again before she dies. I was her
last-born--the child her arms kept the shape of. What am I to her now?
... what does she know of me, of the hard, tired, middle-aged man I
have become? And you are in much the same box, my dear; unless you've
forgotten by now that you ever had a mother."

Mary was scandalised. "Forget one's mother? ... Richard! I think you're
trying what dreadful things you can find to say ... when I write home
every three months!" And provoked by this fresh piece of unreason she
opened fire in earnest, in defence of what she believed to be their
true welfare. Richard listened to her without interrupting; even seemed
to grant the truth of what she said. But none the less, even as she
pleaded with him, a numbing sense of futility crept over her. She
stuttered, halted, and finally fell silent. Her words were like so many
lassos thrown after his vagrant soul; and this was out of reach. It had
sniffed freedom--it WAS free; ran wild already on the boundless plains
of liberty.

After he had gone from the room she sat with idle hands. She was all in
a daze. Richard was about to commit an out-and-out folly, and she was
powerless to hinder it. If only she had had some one she could have
talked things over with, taken advice of! But no--it went against the
grain in her to discuss her husband's actions with a third person.
Purdy had been the sole exception, and Purdy had become impossible.

Looking back, she marvelled at her own dullness in not fore-seeing that
something like this might happen. What more natural than that the
multitude of little whims and fads Richard had indulged should
culminate in a big whim of this kind? But the acknowledgment caused her
fresh anxiety. She had watched him tire, like a fickle child, of first
one thing, th