There was no speech for a little, though Mrs. Gray’s hand wandered caressingly about her daughter’s neck in a way Roberta dearly loved, drawing the loosened dark locks away from the small ears, or twisting a curly strand about her fingers.  Suddenly the girl burst out: 

“Mother, what are you to do when you find all your theories upset?”

“All upset?” repeated Mrs. Gray, in her rich and quiet voice.  “That would be a calamity indeed.  Surely there must be one or two of yours remaining stable?”

“It seems not, just now.  One disproved overturns another.  They all hinge on one another—­at least mine do.”

“Perhaps not as closely as you think.  What is it, dear?  Can you tell me anything about it?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.  Oh, it’s nothing very real, I suppose—­just a sort of vague discomfort at feeling that certain ideals I thought were as fixed as the stars in the heavens seem to be wobbling as if they might shoot downward any minute, and—­and leave only a trail of light behind!”

The last words came on a note of rather shaky laughter.  Roberta’s arm lay across her mother’s knee, her head upon it.  She turned her head downward for an instant, burying her face in the angle of her arm.  Mrs. Gray regarded the mass of dark locks beneath her hand with a look amused yet sympathetic.

“That sort of discomfort attacks us all, at times,” she said.  “Ideals change and develop with our growth.  One would not want the same ones to serve her all her life.”

“I know.  But when it’s not a new and better ideal which displaces the old one, but only—­an attraction—­”

“An attraction not ideal?”

Roberta shook her head.  “I’m afraid not.  And I don’t see why it should be an attraction at all.  It ought not to be, if my ideals have been what they should have been.  And they have.  Why, you gave them to me, mother, many of them—­or at least helped me to work them out for myself.  And I—­I had confidence in them!”

“And they’re shaken?”

“Not the ideals—­they’re all the same.  Only—­they don’t seem to be proof against—­assault.  Oh, I’m talking in riddles, I know.  I don’t want to put any of it into words, it makes it seem more real.  And it’s only a shadowy sort of difficulty.  Maybe that’s all it will be.”

Mothers are wonderful at divination; why should they not be, when all their task is a training in understanding young natures which do not understand themselves.  From these halting phrases of mystery Mrs. Gray gathered much more than her daughter would have imagined.  But she did not let that be seen.

“If it is only a shadowy difficulty the rising of the sun will put it to flight,” she predicted.

Roberta was silent for a space.  Then suddenly she sat up.