She rose suddenly and announced that she was about to retire.  It saved them for the moment, for that day; he muttered something incomprehensible and she was gone.

Isabel Penny returned and took Mrs. Winscombe’s place before the fire.  She spoke trivially, at random intervals.  A great longing swept over him to tell his mother everything, try to find an escape in her wise counsel; but his emotion seemed so ugly that he could not lay it before her.  Besides, he had a conviction that it would be hopeless:  he was gone.  She was discussing Ludowika now.  “Really,” she said, “they seem very well matched, a good arrangement.”  She was referring, he realized, to the Winscombes’ experience.  He never thought of Felix Winscombe as married, Ludowika’s husband; he had ceased to think of him at all.  The present moment banished everything else.  “She has a quality usually destroyed by life about a Court,” the leisurely voice went on; “she seems quite happy here, for a little, in a way simple.  But, curiously enough, she disturbs your father.  He can’t laugh with her as he usually does with attractive women.”

It was natural, Howat thought, that Gilbert Penny should be uneasy before such a direct reminder of the setting from which he had taken Isabel Howat.  It was a life, memories, in which the elder had no part; that consciousness dictated a part of his father’s bitterness toward St. James, the Royal Government.  But Gilbert Penny had never had serious reason to dread it.  His wife had left it all behind, permanently, without, apparently, a regret.  He had a sudden, astonishing community of feeling with the older man; a momentary dislike of St. James, Versailles, the entire, treacherous, silk mob.  A lover at fourteen!  Howat damned such a betrayal with a bitterness whose base lay deeply buried in sex jealousy.

“I am glad,” the other continued, “that you are not susceptible; I suppose you’ll be off hunting in a day or more; Mrs. Winscombe is bright wine for a young man.  Women like her play at sensation, like eating figs.”  He thought contemptuously what nonsense was talked in connection with feminine intuition; it was nothing more than a polite chimera, like all the other famous morals and inhibitions supposed to serve and direct mankind.

He wondered once more about his mother, what the course of her life had been—­happily occupied, filled, or merely self-contained, hiding much in a deep, even flow?  Her head was turned away from him, and he could see the girlish profile, the astonishing illusion of youth renewed.  Howat wanted to ask her how she had experienced, well—­love, since there was no other word.  It had come to her quickly, he knew; her affair with Gilbert Penny had been headlong, or else it would not have been at all; yet he felt she had not been the victim of such a tyranny as mastered himself.  But, perhaps, after all, secretly, every one was—­just animal-like.  He repudiated this firmly, at once.  He himself had felt that he was not entirely animal.