The first light was silvering the gloom above the river, the lamps were paling to the day, when George went out and dropped this missive in the letter-box.  He came back to the river and lay down on an empty bench under the plane-trees of the Embankment, and while he lay there one of those without refuge or home, who lie there night after night, came up unseen and looked at him.

But morning comes, and with it that sense of the ridiculous, so merciful to suffering men.  George got up lest anyone should see a Stoic lying there in his evening clothes; and when it became time he put on his mask and sallied forth.  At the club he found his mother’s note, and set out for her hotel.

Mrs. Pendyce was not yet down, but sent to ask him to come up.  George found her standing in her dressing-gown in the middle of the room, as though she knew not where to place herself for this, their meeting.  Only when he was quite close did she move and throw her arms round his neck.  George could not see her face, and his own was hidden from her, but through the thin dressing-gown he felt her straining to him, and her arms that had pulled his head down quivering; and for a moment it seemed to him as if he were dropping a burden.  But only for a moment, for at the clinging of those arms his instinct took fright.  And though she was smiling, the tears were in her eyes, and this offended him.

“Don’t, mother!”

Mrs. Pendyce’s answer was a long look.  George could not bear it, and turned away.

“Well,” he said gruffly, “when you can tell me what’s brought you up——­”

Mrs. Pendyce sat down on the sofa.  She had been brushing her hair; though silvered, it was still thick and soft, and the sight of it about her shoulders struck George.  He had never thought of her having hair that would hang down.

Sitting on the sofa beside her, he felt her fingers stroking his, begging him not to take offence and leave her.  He felt her eyes trying to see his eyes, and saw her lips trembling; but a stubborn, almost evil smile was fixed upon his face.

“And so, dear—­and so,” she stammered, “I told your father that I couldn’t see that done, and so I came up to you.”

Many sons have found no hardship in accepting all that their mothers do for them as a matter of right, no difficulty in assuming their devotion a matter of course, no trouble in leaving their own affections to be understood; but most sons have found great difficulty in permitting their mothers to diverge one inch from the conventional, to swerve one hair’s breadth from the standard of propriety appropriate to mothers of men of their importance.

It is decreed of mothers that their birth pangs shall not cease until they die.

And George was shocked to hear his mother say that she had left his father to come to him.  It affected his self-esteem in a strange and subtle way.  The thought that tongues might wag about her revolted his manhood and his sense of form.  It seemed strange, incomprehensible, and wholly wrong; the thought, too, gashed through his mind:  ’She is trying to put pressure on me!’