“We will leave you and go back, Stephen,” she said, while a look of faintness spread over her features.  “I feel as if one of my heart attacks might be coming on.”

“Wouldn’t you rather I went home with you?” he inquired solicitously.

His mother shook her head and reached feebly for Margaret’s hand.  “Margaret will take care of me,” she replied in the weak voice before which her husband and her children had learned to tremble.

As he sat there uneasily in the stuffy car, which smelt of camphor and reminded him of a hearse, he was threatened by that familiar sensation of oppression, of closing walls.  Would he ever again be free from this impalpable terror, from this dread of being shut within a space so small that he must smother if he did not escape?  And not only places but persons, as he had found long ago, persons with closed souls, with narrow minds, produced in him this feeling of physical suffocation.  Margaret, with her serenity, her changeless sweetness, affected him precisely as he was affected by the stained glass windows of a church.  He felt that he should stifle unless he could break away into a place where there were winds and blown shadows and pure sunshine.  He admired her; he might have loved her; but she smothered him like that rich and heavy wave of the past from which he was still struggling to free himself.  For he knew now that it was not the past he wanted; it was the future.  Above all things he needed release, he needed deliverance; and yet he knew, more surely at this moment than ever before, that he was not free, that he was still in chains, still the servant, not the master, of tradition.  He lacked the courage of life, the will to feel and to live.  Only through emotion, only through some courageous adventure of the spirit, only through daring to be human, could he reach liberation; and yet he could not dare; he could not let himself go; he could not lose his life in order that he might find it.  Corinna was right, he felt, when she called him a prig.  She was right though he hated priggishness, though he longed to be natural and human, to let himself be swept away on the tide of some irresistible impulse.  He longed to dare, and yet he had never dared.  He longed to take risks, and yet he studied every step of the road.  He longed to be unconventional, and yet he would have died rather than wear a red flower in his buttonhole.  The thought of Patty rushed over him like the wind at dawn or the light of the sunrise.  There was deliverance; there was freedom of spirit!  She was the impulse he dared not follow, the risk he dared not take, the red flower he dared not wear.

“What lovely eyes Miss Vetch has,” Margaret was saying.  “Don’t you think so, Cousin Harriet?”

Mrs. Culpeper sniffed at her bottle of smelling-salts.  “She seemed to me very ordinary,” she answered stiffly.  “How could Gideon Vetch’s daughter be anything else?”

“Yes, it’s a pity about her father,” admitted Margaret placidly.  “If what Mr. Benham thinks is true, I suppose the Governor has agreed not to interfere in this dreadful strike.”