Maurice, taking another step into paternal wisdom, was deaf to the statute of limitation in the apology; but walking home with the little boy, he said to himself, “She’s ruining him!” and fell into such moody silence that he didn’t even notice Jacky’s obedient struggles with “isn’t.”  Once, a week later, as a result of this experience, he tried to make some ethical suggestions to Lily.  She was displaying her latest triumph—­a rosebush, blossoming in February!  And Maurice, duly admiring the glowing flower, against its background of soot-speckled snowdrift on the window sill, began upon Jacky’s morals.  Lily’s good-humored face hardened.

“Mr. Curtis, you don’t need to worry about Jacky!  He don’t steal, and he don’t swear,—­much; and he’s never been pinched, and he’s awful handsome; and, my God! what more do you want?  I ain’t going to make his life miserable by tellin’ him to talk grammar, or do the polite act!”

“Lily, I only mean I want him to turn out well, and he won’t unless he tells the truth—­”

“He’ll turn out good.  You needn’t worry.  Anybody’s got to have sense about telling the truth; you can’t just plunk everything out!  I—­I believe I’ll go and live in New York.”

Instantly Maurice was silenced.  “She mustn’t take him away!” he thought, despairingly.

His fear that she would do so was a constant worry....  His work in the Weston real-estate office involved occasional business trips of a few days, and his long hours on trains were filled with this increasing anxiety about Jacky.  “If she takes him away from Mercer, and I can’t ever see him, nothing can save him!  But, damn it! what can I do?” he would say.  He tried to reassure himself by counting up Lily’s good points; her present uprightness; her honest friendliness to him; her almost insane devotion to Jacky, and her pathetic aspiration for respectability, which was summed up in that one word of collective emptiness,—­“Society.”  But immediately her bad points clamored in his mind; her ignorance and unmorality and vulgarity.  “Truth is just a matter of expediency with her.  If he gets to be a liar, I’ll boot him!” Maurice would think of these bad points until he got perfectly frantic!  His sense of wanting advice was like an ache in his mind—­for there was no one who could advise him.  Then, quite unexpectedly, advice came....

In the fall the Houghtons got back from Europe.  Maurice saw them only between trains in Mercer, for Henry Houghton was in a great hurry to get up to Green Hill, and Edith, too, was exercised about her trunks and the unpacking of her treasures of reminiscence.  But Mrs. Houghton said:  “We shall be coming down to do some shopping before Christmas.  No!  We’ll not inflict ourselves upon Eleanor!  We’ll go to the hotel; you will both take dinner with us.”

They came, and Maurice and Eleanor dined with them, as Mrs. Houghton had insisted that they should; but only Mrs. Houghton accepted Eleanor’s repaying hospitality.