that since he went to school he
had never wanted her at all. She had tried so many years to believe that
he did, till it had become part of her life, as it was part of her
life to say her prayers night and morning; and now she found it was all
pretence. But, lying awake, she still tried to believe it, because to
that she had been bound when she brought him, firstborn, into the world.
Her other son, her daughters, she loved them too, but it was not the
same thing, quite; she had never wanted them to want her, because that
part of her had been given once for all to George.

The street noises died down at last; she had slept two hours when they
began again. She lay listening. And the noises and her thoughts became
tangled in her exhausted brain--one great web of weariness, a
feeling that it was all senseless and unnecessary, the emanation of
cross-purposes and cross-grainedness, the negation of that gentle
moderation, her own most sacred instinct. And an early wasp, attracted
by the sweet perfumes of her dressing-table, roused himself from the
corner where he had spent the night, and began to hum and hover over the
bed. Mrs. Pendyce was a little afraid of wasps, so, taking a moment
when he was otherwise engaged, she stole out, and fanned him with her
nightdress-case till, perceiving her to be a lady, he went away. Lying
down again, she thought: 'People will worry them until they sting, and
then kill them; it's so unreasonable,' not knowing that she was putting
all her thoughts on suffering in a single nutshell.

She breakfasted upstairs, unsolaced by any news from George. Then
with no definite hope, but a sort of inner certainty, she formed the
resolution to call on Mrs. Bellew. She determined, however, first to
visit Mr. Paramor, and, having but a hazy notion of the hour when men
begin to work, she did not dare to start till past eleven, and told her
cabman to drive her slowly. He drove her, therefore, faster than
his wont. In Leicester Square the passage of a Personage between two
stations blocked the traffic, and on the footways were gathered a crowd
of simple folk with much in their hearts and little in their stomachs,
who raised a cheer as the Personage passed. Mrs. Pendyce looked eagerly
from her cab, for she too loved a show.

The crowd dispersed, and the cab went on.

It was the first time she had ever found herself in the business
apartment of any professional man less important than a dentist. From
the littl