“Oh, well, there’s no use arguing it,” the man said pleasantly after a sulphurous interval.  “Fortunately for her, most people don’t feel as you do.”

“You surely don’t think that I originated this theory?” his mother asked quietly after a silence, during which her long needles moved a little more swiftly than was natural.

“I don’t think anything about it.  I know that you’re much, much narrower about such things than your religion or any religion gives you any right to be,” Warren asserted hotly.  “It is nothing to me, but I hate this smug parcelling out of other people’s affairs,” he went on.  “Mrs. Breckenridge is a very wonderful and a most unfortunate woman; her husband isn’t fit to lace her shoes—­”

“All that may be true,” his mother interrupted with some agitation.

“All that may be true, you say!  And yet if Rachael left him, and tried to find happiness somewhere else—­”

“The law is not of my making, James,” the old lady intervened mildly, noting his use of the discussed woman’s name with a pang.

“But it is of your making—­you people who sit around and say what’s respectable and what’s not respectable!  Who are you to judge?”

“I try not to judge,” Mrs. Gregory said so simply that the man’s anger cooled in spite of himself.  “And perhaps I am foolish, James, all mothers are.  But you are the last of my four sons, and I am a widow in my old age, and I tremble for you.  When a woman with beauty as great as that confides in you, my child, when she turns to you, your soul is in danger, and your mother sees it.  I cannot—­I cannot be silent—­”

Rachael herself, an hour ago, had not used her youth and beauty with more definite design than was this other woman using her age and infirmity now.  Warren Gregory was almost as readily affected.

“My dear Mother,” he said sensibly and charmingly, “don’t think for one instant that I do not appreciate your devotion to me.  What has suddenly put into your head this concern about Mrs. Breckenridge, I can’t imagine.  I know that if she were ever in any trouble or need you would be the first to defend her.  She is in a peculiarly difficult position, and in a professional way I am somewhat in her confidence, that’s all!”

“I should think she could do something with Clarence,” the old lady said, somewhat mollified.  “Interest him in something new; lead him away from bad influences.”

“Clarence is rather a hopeless problem,” Warren Gregory said.  The talk drifted away to other persons and affairs, but when they presently parted, with great amiability on both sides, Warren Gregory knew that his mother’s suspicions had in some mysterious way been aroused, and old Mrs. Gregory, sitting alone in the heat of the afternoon, writhed in the grip of a definite apprehension.  Absurd—­absurd—­to interpret that married woman’s brightly innocent glances into a declaration of love, absurd to find passion concealed in Warren’s cheerfully hospitable manner.  But she could not shake off the terrified conviction that it was so.