Aunt Charlotte let her knitting fall on her lap in despair.  “Austin,” she said, in her most solemn tones, “I never regretted your poor mother’s death as I regret it at this moment.”

“Why, auntie?” he asked, surprised.

“Perhaps she would have understood you better; perhaps she might even have been able to manage you,” replied the poor lady.  “I confess that you’re beyond me altogether.  Do you know what it was she said to me upon her death-bed?  ‘Charlotte,’ she said, ’my only sorrow in dying is that I shall never be able to bring up my boy.  Who will ever take such care of him as I should?’ You were then two days old, and the very next day she died.  I’ve never forgotten it.  She passed away with that sorrow, that terrible anxiety, tearing at her heart.  I took her place, as you know, but of course I was only a makeshift.  I often wonder whether she is still as anxious about you as she was then.”

“My dearest auntie, you’ve been an angel in a lace cap to me all my life, and I’m sure my mother isn’t worrying herself about me one bit.  Why should she?” argued Austin.  “I’m leading a lovely life, I’m as happy as the days are long, and if my tastes don’t run in the direction of selling screws or posting ledgers, nothing that anybody can say will change them.  And I tell you candidly that if they were so changed they would certainly be changed for the worse.  I hate ugly things as intensely as I love beautiful ones, and I’m very thankful that I’m not ugly myself.  Now don’t look at me like that; it’s so conventional!  Of course I know I’m not ugly, but rather the reverse (that’s a modest way of putting it), and I pray to beloved Pan that he will give me beauty in the inward soul so that the inward and the outward man may be at one.  That’s out of the ‘Phaedrus,’ you know—­a very much superior composition to ‘Self Help.’  So cheer up, auntie, and don’t look on me as a doomed soul because we’re not both turned out of the same melting-pot.  Now I’m just going upstairs to see to the arrangement of my new room, and then I shall go and help Lubin in the garden.”

So saying, he strolled out.  But poor Aunt Charlotte only shook her head.  She could not forget how Austin’s mother had grieved at not living to bring up her boy, and wished more earnestly than ever that the responsibility had fallen into other hands than hers.  There was something so dreadfully uncanny about Austin.  His ignorance about the common facts of life was as extraordinary as his perfect familiarity with matters known only to great scholars.  His views and tastes were strange to her, so strange as to be beyond her comprehension altogether.  She found herself unable to argue with him because their minds were set on different planes, and her representations did not seem to touch him in the very least.  And yet, after all, he was a very good boy, full of pure thoughts and kindly impulses and spiritual intuitions and intellectual proclivities