not selling it.  I had brought him up to depend on money, but the paper had given us enough money to gratify all his tastes.  At last we could turn on the monster that had nourished us.  I felt a savage joy in the thought—­I could hardly bear to wait till Alan came of age.  But I had never spoken to him of the paper, and I didn’t dare speak of it now.  Some false shame kept me back, some vague belief in his ignorance.  I would wait till he was twenty-one, and then we should be free.

“I waited—­the day came, and I spoke.  You can guess his answer, I suppose.  He had no idea of selling the Radiator.  It wasn’t the money he cared for—­it was the career that tempted him.  He was a born journalist, and his ambition, ever since he could remember, had been to carry on his father’s work, to develop, to surpass it.  There was nothing in the world as interesting as modern journalism.  He couldn’t imagine any other kind of life that wouldn’t bore him to death.  A newspaper like the Radiator might be made one of the biggest powers on earth, and he loved power, and meant to have all he could get.  I listened to him in a kind of trance.  I couldn’t find a word to say.  His father had had scruples—­he had none.  I seemed to realize at once that argument would be useless.  I don’t know that I even tried to plead with him—­he was so bright and hard and inaccessible!  Then I saw that he was, after all, what I had made him—­the creature of my concessions, my connivances, my evasions.  That was the price I had paid for him—­I had kept him at that cost!

“Well—­I had kept him, at any rate.  That was the feeling that survived.  He was my boy, my son, my very own—­till some other woman took him.  Meanwhile the old life must go on as it could.  I gave up the struggle.  If at that point he was inaccessible, at others he was close to me.  He has always been a perfect son.  Our tastes grew together—­we enjoyed the same books, the same pictures, the same people.  All I had to do was to look at him in profile to see the side of him that was really mine.  At first I kept thinking of the dreadful other side—­but gradually the impression faded, and I kept my mind turned from it, as one does from a deformity in a face one loves.  I thought I had made my last compromise with life—­had hit on a modus vivendi that would last my time.

“And then he met you.  I had always been prepared for his marrying, but not a girl like you.  I thought he would choose a sweet thing who would never pry into his closets—­he hated women with ideas!  But as soon as I saw you I knew the struggle would have to begin again.  He is so much stronger than his father—­he is full of the most monstrous convictions.  And he has the courage of them, too—­you saw last year that his love for you never made him waver.  He believes in his work; he adores it—­it is a kind of hideous idol to which he would make human sacrifices!  He loves you still—­I’ve been honest with you—­but his love wouldn’t