I disregarded an annoying tendency to feel dizzy that came over me and was very careful in managing my voice.

“May I ask, Madame, why you are telling me all this?”

“For two reasons,” she condescended graciously.  “First of all because Mr. Mills told me that you were much more mature than one would expect.  In fact you look much younger than I was prepared for.”

“Madame,” I interrupted her, “I may have a certain capacity for action and for responsibility, but as to the regions into which this very unexpected conversation has taken me I am a great novice.  They are outside my interest.  I have had no experience.”

“Don’t make yourself out so hopeless,” she said in a spoilt-beauty tone.  “You have your intuitions.  At any rate you have a pair of eyes.  You are everlastingly over there, so I understand.  Surely you have seen how far they are . . .”

I interrupted again and this time bitterly, but always in a tone of polite enquiry: 

“You think her facile, Madame?”

She looked offended.  “I think her most fastidious.  It is my son who is in question here.”

And I understood then that she looked on her son as irresistible.  For my part I was just beginning to think that it would be impossible for me to wait for his return.  I figured him to myself lying dressed on his bed sleeping like a stone.  But there was no denying that the mother was holding me with an awful, tortured interest.  Twice Therese had opened the door, had put her small head in and drawn it back like a tortoise.  But for some time I had lost the sense of us two being quite alone in the studio.  I had perceived the familiar dummy in its corner but it lay now on the floor as if Therese had knocked it down angrily with a broom for a heathen idol.  It lay there prostrate, handless, without its head, pathetic, like the mangled victim of a crime.

“John is fastidious, too,” began Mrs. Blunt again.  “Of course you wouldn’t suppose anything vulgar in his resistances to a very real sentiment.  One has got to understand his psychology.  He can’t leave himself in peace.  He is exquisitely absurd.”

I recognized the phrase.  Mother and son talked of each other in identical terms.  But perhaps “exquisitely absurd” was the Blunt family saying?  There are such sayings in families and generally there is some truth in them.  Perhaps this old woman was simply absurd.  She continued: 

“We had a most painful discussion all this morning.  He is angry with me for suggesting the very thing his whole being desires.  I don’t feel guilty.  It’s he who is tormenting himself with his infinite scrupulosity.”

“Ah,” I said, looking at the mangled dummy like the model of some atrocious murder.  “Ah, the fortune.  But that can be left alone.”

“What nonsense!  How is it possible?  It isn’t contained in a bag, you can’t throw it into the sea.  And moreover, it isn’t her fault.  I am astonished that you should have thought of that vulgar hypocrisy.  No, it isn’t her fortune that cheeks my son; it’s something much more subtle.  Not so much her history as her position.  He is absurd.  It isn’t what has happened in her life.  It’s her very freedom that makes him torment himself and her, too—­ as far as I can understand.”