“Indeed, it was my own ill nature,” said Ellen stoutly.  “But let us cease this moral babble, as Milton says.  I wish you’d tell me why you’re surprised that I should be clever, though you were quite cairtain that he would have chosen a good-looking gairl?”

Mrs. Yaverland explained hesitantly, delicately.  “Richard has tried to fall in love before, you know.  And he has always chosen such stupid women.”

Ellen was puzzled and displeased, though of course it was not the notion that he had tried to fall in love with stupid women that distressed her, and not merely the notion of his trying to fall in love with other women.  Thank goodness she was modern and therefore without jealousy.  “Why did he do that?  Why did he do that?”

There appeared on Marion’s face something that was like the ashes of archness.  Her heart said jubilantly to itself:  “Why, because he loves me, his mother, so far beyond all reason!  Because he thinks me perfect, the queen of all women who have brains and passions, and all other women who pretend to these things seem pretenders to my throne, on whom he can bestow no favour without suspicion of disloyalty to me.  So he went to the other women, who plainly weren’t competing with me; those who were specialising in those arts that turn them from women into birds with bright feathers and a cheeping song and lightness unweighted by the soul.  He went to them more readily, I do believe, because he knew that their lack of all he loved in me would send him back to me the sooner.  I will not believe that any son ever had for his mother a more absurd infatuation.  I am the happiest woman in the world.  And yet I know it was not right it should be so.  What is to happen to him when I die?  And he takes all my troubles on himself and feels as if they were his own.  But I can see that you, my dear, are going to break the spell that, so much against my will, I’ve thrown over my son.  And no other woman in the world could have done it.  You have all the qualities he loves in me, but they are put together in such a different mode from mine that there cannot possibly be any question of competition between us.  You are hardly more than a child, and I am an elderly woman; you are red and fiery, I am dark and slow; your passion grows out of your character like a flower out of the earth, while Heaven knows that I have hardly any character outside my capacity for feeling.  So he feels free to love you.  Oh, my dear, I am so grateful to you.”  But because for many years she had been sealed in reserve to all but Richard, she listened to free speech coming from her lips as amazedly as a man cured of muteness in late life might listen to his own first uncouth noises.  So she said none of these things, but murmured, smiling coldly, “Oh, there’s a reason....  I’ll tell you some time....”