“Neville is ill,” she said.  “She certainly won’t be fit to travel out of England this winter.  Influenza coming on the top of that miserable breakdown is a thing to be treated with the greatest care.  Even when she is recovered, post-influenza will keep her weak till the summer.  I am really anxious about her.  No; Neville is quite out of the question.”

“Well, what about Pamela?”

“Pamela is up to her eyes in her work....  Besides, why should Pamela go, or Neville, rather than I?  A girl’s mother is obviously the right person.  I may not be of much use to my children in these days, but at least I hope I can save them from themselves.”

“It takes a clever parent to do that, Emily,” said Grandmama, who doubtless knew.

“But, mother, what would you have me do?  Sit with my hands before me while my daughter lives in sin?  What’s your plan?”

“I’m too old to make plans, dear.  I can only look on at the world.  I’ve looked at the world now for many, many years, and I’ve learnt that only great wisdom and great love can change people’s decisions as to their way of life, or turn them from evil courses.  Frankly, my child, I doubt if you have, where Nan is concerned, enough wisdom or enough love.  Enough sympathy, I should rather say, for you have love.  But do you feel you understand the child enough to interfere wisely and successfully?”

“Oh, you think I’m a fool, mother; of course I know you’ve always thought me a fool.  Good God, if a mother can’t interfere with her own daughter to save her from wickedness and disaster, who can, I should like to know?”

“One would indeed like to know that,” Grandmama said, sadly.

“Perhaps you’d like to go yourself,” Mrs. Hilary shot at her, quivering now with anger and feeling.

“No, my dear.  Even if I were able to get to Rome I should know that I was too old to interfere with the lives of the young.  I don’t understand them enough.  You believe that you do.  Well, I suppose you must go and try.  I can’t stop you.”

“You certainly can’t.  Nothing can stop me....  You’re singularly unsympathetic, mother, about this awful business.”

“I don’t feel so, dear.  I am very, very sorry for you, and very, very sorry for Nan (whom, you must remember, we may be slandering).  I have always looked on unlawful love as a very great sin, though there may be great provocation to it.”

“It is an awful sin.”  Mr. Cradock could say what he liked on that subject; he might tell Mrs. Hilary that it was not awful except in so far as any other yielding to nature’s promptings in defiance of the law of man was awful, but he could not persuade her.  Like many other people, she set that particular sin apart, in a special place by itself; she would talk of “a bad woman,” “an immoral man,” a girl who had “lost her character,” and mean merely the one kind of badness, the one manifestation of immorality, the one element in character.  Dishonesty and cruelty she could forgive, but never that.