Meanwhile Robin, according to his nurse, “was growing something wonderful, and improving with his looks like nothing I ever see before, and me with babies ever since I can remember anything as you may say, a dear!” His immediate circle of wondering admirers was becoming almost extensive, including, as it did, not only his mother and father, his nurse, and the four servants at No. 5 Little Market Street, but also Mrs. Leith senior, Bruce Evelin—­now rather a lonely man—­and Mr. Thrush of John’s Court near the Edgware Road.

At this stage of his existence, Rosamund loved Robin reasonably but with a sort of still and holy concentration, which gradually impinged upon Dion like a quiet force which spreads subtly, affecting those in its neighborhood.  There was in it something mystical and, remembering her revelation to him of the desire to enter the religious life which had formerly threatened to dominate her, Dion now fully realized the truth of a remark once made by Mrs. Chetwinde about his wife.  She had called Rosamund “a radiant mystic.”

Now changes were blossoming in Rosamund like new flowers coming up in a garden, and one of these flowers was a beautiful selfishness.  So Dion called it to himself but never to others.  It was a selfishness surely deliberate and purposeful—­an unselfish selfishness, if such a thing can be.  Can the ideal mother, Dion asked himself, be wholly without it?  All that she is, perhaps, reacts upon the child of her bosom, the child who looks up to her as its Providence.  And what she is must surely be at least partly conditioned by what she does and by all her way of life.  The child is her great concern, and therefore she must guard sedulously all the gates by which possible danger to the child might strive to enter in.  This was what Rosamund had evidently made up her mind to do, was beginning to do.  Dion compared her with many of the woman of London who have children and who, nevertheless, continue to lead haphazard, frivolous, utterly thoughtless lives, caring apparently little more for the moral welfare of their children than for the moral welfare of their Pekinese.  Mrs. Clarke had a hatred of “things with wings growing out of their shoulders.”  Rosamund would probably never wish their son to have wings growing out of his shoulders, but if he had little wings on his sandals, like the Hermes, perhaps she would be very happy.  With winged sandals he might take an occasional flight to the gods.  Hermes, of course, was really a rascal, many-sided, and, like most many-sided people and gods, capable of insincerity and even of cunning; but the Hermes of Olympia, their Hermes, was the messenger purged, by Praxiteles of very bit of dross—­noble, manly, pure, serene.  Little Robin bore at present no resemblance to the Hermes, or indeed—­despite the nurse’s statements—­to any one else except another baby; but already it was beginning mysteriously to be possible to foresee the great advance—­long clothes to short clothes, short clothes to knickerbockers,