“Ah!” said Felix.  “And now we may as well go out to the car!”

He was conscious of a slight stoppage in his mother’s footsteps and rather a convulsive squeeze of her hand on his arm.  Looking at her face, he discovered it occupied with a process whose secret he could not penetrate, a kind of disarray of her features, rapidly and severely checked, and capped with a resolute smile.  They had already reached the station exit, where Stanley’s car was snorting.  Frances Freeland looked at it, then, mounting rather hastily, sat, compressing her lips.

When they were off, Felix said: 

“Would you like to stop at the church and have a look at the brasses to your grandfather and the rest of them?”

His mother, who had slipped her hand under his arm again, answered: 

“No, dear; I’ve seen them.  The church is not at all beautiful.  I like the old church at Becket so much better; it is such a pity your great-grandfather was not buried there.”

She had never quite got over the lack of ‘niceness’ about those ploughs.

Going, as was the habit of Stanley’s car, at considerable speed, Felix was not at first certain whether the peculiar little squeezes his arm was getting were due to the bounds of the creature under them or to some cause more closely connected with his mother, and it was not till they shaved a cart at the turning of the Becket drive that it suddenly dawned on him that she was in terror.  He discovered it in looking round just as she drew her smile over a spasm of her face and throat.  And, leaning out of the car, he said: 

“Drive very slowly, Batter; I want to look at the trees.”

A little sigh rewarded him.  Since she had said nothing, He said nothing, and Clara’s words in the hall seemed to him singularly tactless: 

“Oh!  I meant to have reminded you, Felix, to send the car back and take a fly.  I thought you knew that Mother’s terrified of motors.”  And at his mother’s answer: 

“Oh! no; I quite enjoyed it, dear,” he thought:  ’Bless her heart!  She is a stoic!’

Whether or no to tell her of the ‘kick-up at Joyfields’ exercised his mind.  The question was intricate, for she had not yet been informed that Nedda and Derek were engaged, and Felix did not feel at liberty to forestall the young people.  That was their business.  On the other hand, she would certainly glean from Clara a garbled understanding of the recent events at Joyfields, if she were not first told of them by himself.  And he decided to tell her, with the natural trepidation of one who, living among principles and theories, never quite knew what those, for whom each fact is unrelated to anything else under the moon, were going to think.  Frances Freeland, he knew well, kept facts and theories especially unrelated, or, rather, modified her facts to suit her theories, instead of, like Felix, her theories to suit her facts.  For example, her