Her apprehension had already preceded him.  “Hope Fenno—?” she faltered.

He nodded.  “She’s been thinking—­hard.  It was very painful—­to me, at least; and I don’t believe she enjoyed it:  she said she didn’t.”  He stretched his feet to the fire.  “The result of her cogitations is that she won’t have me.  She arrived at this by pure ratiocination—­it’s not a question of feeling, you understand.  I’m the only man she’s ever loved—­but she won’t have me.  What novels did you read when you were young, dear?  I’m convinced it all turns on that.  If she’d been brought up on Trollope and Whyte-Melville, instead of Tolstoi and Mrs. Ward, we should have now been vulgarly sitting on a sofa, trying on the engagement-ring.”

Mrs. Quentin at first was kept silent by the mother’s instinctive anger that the girl she has not wanted for her son should have dared to refuse him.  Then she said, “Tell me, dear.”

“My good woman, she has scruples.”

“Scruples?”

“Against the paper.  She objects to me in my official capacity as owner of the Radiator.”

His mother did not echo his laugh.

“She had found a solution, of course—­she overflows with expedients.  I was to chuck the paper, and we were to live happily ever afterward on canned food and virtue.  She even had an alternative ready—­women are so full of resources!  I was to turn the Radiator into an independent organ, and run it at a loss to show the public what a model newspaper ought to be.  On the whole, I think she fancied this plan more than the other—­it commended itself to her as being more uncomfortable and aggressive.  It’s not the fashion nowadays to be good by stealth.”

Mrs. Quentin said to herself, “I didn’t know how much he cared!” Aloud she murmured, “You must give her time.”

“Time?”

“To move out the old prejudices and make room for new ones.”

“My dear mother, those she has are brand-new; that’s the trouble with them.  She’s tremendously up-to-date.  She takes in all the moral fashion-papers, and wears the newest thing in ethics.”

Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of his metaphor.  “Is she so very religious?”

“You dear archaic woman!  She’s hopelessly irreligious; that’s the difficulty.  You can make a religious woman believe almost anything:  there’s the habit of credulity to work on.  But when a girl’s faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it’s very hard to inspire her with confidence.  She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it’s her duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you’re not obsolete, or whether the text isn’t corrupt, or somebody hasn’t proved conclusively that you never existed, anyhow.”

Mrs. Quentin was again silent.  The two moved in that atmosphere of implications and assumptions where the lightest word may shake down the dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes more difficult between them than had their union been less close.