" Mabel said.

V

Mrs. Perch was a fragile little body whose life should have been and
could have been divided between her bed and a bath chair. She was,
however, as she said, "always on her legs." And she was always on her
legs and always doing what she had not the strength to do, because, as
she said, she "had always done it." She conducted her existence in the
narrow space between the adamant wall of the things she had always done,
always eaten, and always worn, and the adamant wall of the things she
had never done, never eaten, and never worn. There was not much room
between the two.

She was intensely weak-sighted, but she never could find her glasses;
and she kept locked everything that would lock, but she never could find
her keys. She held off all acquaintances by the rigid handle of "that"
before their names, but she was very fond of "that Mr. Sabre", and Sabre
returned a great affection for her. With his trick of seeing things with
his mental vision he always saw old Mrs. Perch toddling with moving lips
and fumbling fingers between the iron walls of her prejudices, and this
was a pathetic picture to him, for ease or pleasure were not discernible
between the walls. Nevertheless Mrs. Perch found pleasures therein, and
the way in which her face then lit up added, to Sabre, an indescribable
poignancy to the pathos of the picture. She never could pass a baby
without stopping to adore it, and an astounding tide of rejuvenation
would then flood up from mysterious mains, welling upon her silvered
cheeks and through her dim eyes, stilling the movement of her lips and
the fumbling motions of her fingers.

Also amazing tides of glory when she was watching for her son, and saw
him.

Young Perch was a tall and slight young man with a happy laugh and an
air which suggested to Sabre, after puzzlement, that his spirit was only
alighted in his body as a bird alights and swings upon a twig, not
engrossed in his body. He did not look very strong. His mother said he
had a weak heart. He said he had a particularly strong heart and used to
protest, "Oh, Mother, I do wish you wouldn't talk that bosh about me."
To which Mrs. Perch would say, "It's no good saying you _haven't_ got a
weak heart because you _have_ got a weak heart and you've always _had_ a
weak heart. Surely I ought to know."

Young Perch would reply, "You ought to know, but you don't know. You get
an idea in your head and nothing will ever get it out. Some day