She took up a thin captain biscuit and bit it absent-mindedly.  It trembled in her hand like a leaf.

“Yes, it is true that Rrchud isn’t like other women’s boys.  You know it, Meta.  Angela evidently knows it, and—­at least since yesterday—­I know that I know it.  His not being able to read or write—­I always knew in my heart that my old worn-out tag—­’We can’t all be literary geniuses’—­didn’t meet the case.  His way of disappearing and never explaining....  Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys, doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with hundreds of real boys ... in 1914....  It was the happiest day I ever had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy.  Well, then, as you know, he couldn’t get a commission, couldn’t even get his stripe, poor darling.  He deserted twice—­pure absence of mind—­it was always the same from a child—­’I wanted to see further,’ he’d say, and of course worse in the trenches.  Why, you know it all, Angela dear—­at least, perhaps not quite all.  I should like to tell you—­because you said that about the splendour of being the mother of Rrchud....

“Pinehurst—­my husband, he is a doctor, you know—­had that same passion for seeing further.  He was often ill in London.  I said it was asthma, but he said it was not being able to see far enough.  We were in America for Rrchud’s birth, and Pinehurst insisted on going West.  I took the precaution of having a good nurse with me.  Pinehurst said the East was full of little obstacles, and people’s eyes had sucked all the secrets out of the horizon, he said.  I like Cape Cod, but he said there was always a wall of sea round those flat wet places.  We stayed in a blacksmith’s spare room on the desert of Wyoming, but even that horizon seemed a little higher than we, and one clear day, in a pink sunrise, we saw something that might have been a dream, my dears, and might have been the Rockies.  Pinehurst couldn’t stand that, we pushed west—­so tahsome.  We climbed a little narrow track up a mountain, in a light buggy that a goldminer lent us.  Oh, of course, you’ll think us mad, Meta, but, do you know, we actually found the world’s edge, a place with no horizon; we looked between ragged pine trees, and saw over the shoulders of great old violet mountains—­we saw right down into the stars for ever....  There was a tower of rocks—­rose-red rocks in sloping layers—­sunny hot by day, my dears, and a great shelter by night.  You know, the little dark clouds walk alone upon the mountain tops at sunset—­as you said, Angela—­they are like trees, and sometimes like faces, and sometimes like the shadows of little bent gipsies....  I used to look at the mountains and think:  ’What am I about, to be so worried and so small, in sight of such an enormous storm of mountains under a gold sky?’ I think of those rocks often at night, standing just as we left them, all by themselves, under that unnatural moon,—­it was an unnatural moon on the edge