The sound sense of those words had made her feel queer when they were spoken; they were even more sensible than she had thought.  Did her little daughter, so young and pretty, seriously mean to plunge into the rescue work of dismal slums, to cut herself adrift from sweet sounds and scents and colours, from music and art, from dancing, flowers, and all that made life beautiful?  The secret forces of fastidiousness, an inborn dread of the fanatical, and all her real ignorance of what such a life was like, rose in Cecilia with a force which made her feel quite sick.  Better that she herself should do this thing than that her own child should be deprived of air and light and all the just environment of her youth and beauty.  ‘She must come back—­she must listen to me!’ she thought.  ’We will begin together; we will start a nice little creche of our own, or—­perhaps Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace could find us some regular work on one of her committees.’

Then suddenly she conceived a thought which made her blood run positively cold.  What if it were a matter of heredity?  What if Thyme had inherited her grandfather’s single-mindedness?  Martin was giving proof of it.  Things, she knew, often skipped a generation and then set in again.  Surely, surely, it could not have done that!  With longing, yet with dread, she waited for the sound of Stephen’s latchkey.  It came at its appointed time.

Even in her agitation Cecilia did not forget to spare him, all she could.  She began by giving him a kiss, and then said casually:  “Thyme has got a whim into her head.”

“What whim?”

“It’s rather what you might expect,” faltered Cecilia, “from her going about so much with Martin.”

Stephen’s face assumed at once an air of dry derision; there was no love lost between him and his young nephew-in-law.

“The Sanitist?” he said; “ah!  Well?”

“She has gone off to do work-some place in the Euston Road.  I’ve had a telegram.  Oh, and I found this, Stephen.”

She held out to him half-heartedly the two bits of paper, one pinkish-brown, the other blue.  Stephen saw that she was trembling.  He took them from her, read them, and looked at her again.  He had a real affection for his wife, and the tradition of consideration for other people’s feelings was bred in him, so that at this moment, so vitally disturbing, the first thing he did was to put his hand on her shoulder and give it a reassuring squeeze.  But there was also in Stephen a certain primitive virility, pickled, it is true, at Cambridge, and in the Law Courts dried, but still preserving something of its possessive and assertive quality, and the second thing he did was to say, “No, I’m damned!”