Michael interrupted her.

“Oh, I don’t understand him,” he said.  “At least, that’s the best way to look at it.  Let’s leave him out.”

He paused a moment.

“After all, it is a much better plan than our living all three of us at Ashbridge.  It’s better for my mother, and for me, and for him.”

“I know, but how he could consent to the better plan,” she said.  “Well, let us leave him out.  Poor Robert!  He and his golf.  My dear, your father is a very ludicrous person, you know.  But about you, Michael, do you think you can stand it?”

He smiled at her.

“Why, of course I can,” he said.  “Indeed, I don’t think I’ll accept that statement of it.  It’s—­it’s such a score to be able to be of use, you know.  I can make my mother happy.  Nobody else can.  I think I’m getting rather conceited about it.”

“Yes, dear; I find you insufferable,” remarked Aunt Barbara parenthetically.

“Then you must just bear it.  The thing is”—­Michael took a moment to find the words he searched for—­“the thing is I want to be wanted.  Well, it’s no light thing to be wanted by your mother, even if—­”

He sat down on the sofa by his aunt.

“Aunt Barbara, how ironically gifts come,” he said.  “This was rather a sinister way of giving, that my mother should want me like this just as her brain was failing.  And yet that failure doesn’t affect the quality of her love.  Is it something that shines through the poor tattered fabric?  Anyhow, it has nothing to do with her brain.  It is she herself, somehow, not anything of hers, that wants me.  And you ask if I can stand it?”

Michael with his ugly face and his kind eyes and his simple heart seemed extraordinarily charming just then to Aunt Barbara.  She wished that Sylvia could have seen him then in all the unconsciousness of what he was doing so unquestioningly, or that she could have seen him as she had with his mother during the last hour.  Lady Ashbridge had insisted on sitting close to him, and holding his hand whenever she could possess herself of it, of plying him with a hundred repeated questions, and never once had she made Michael either ridiculous or self-conscious.  And this, she reflected, went on most of the day, and for how many days it would go on, none knew.  Yet Michael could not consider even whether he could stand it; he rejected the expression as meaningless.

“And your friends?” she said.  “Do you manage to see them?”

“Oh, yes, occasionally,” said Michael.  “They don’t come here, for the presence of strangers makes my mother agitated.  She thinks they have some design of taking her or me away.  But she wants to see Sylvia.  She knows about—­about her and me, and I can’t make up my mind what to do about it.  She is always asking if I can’t take her to see Sylvia, or get her to come here.”

“And why not?  Sylvia knows about your mother, I suppose.”

“I expect so.  I told Hermann.  But I am afraid my mother will—­well, you can’t call it arguing—­but will try to persuade her to have me.  I can’t let Sylvia in for that.  Nor, if it comes to that, can I let myself in for that.”