How she rebelled, furious and despairing, against the fortuitous cruelty of things!  She was sure that he had not, till then, thought seriously of going to London.  But the fact that the Government would admit him free to its classrooms and give him a pound a week besides, somehow forced him to go to London.  It was not the lack of means that would have prevented him from going.  Why, then, should the presence of means induce him to go?  There was no logical reason.  The whole affair was disastrously absurd.  The art-master at the Wedgwood Institution had chanced, merely chanced, to suggest that the drinking-cup should be sent to South Kensington.  And the result of this caprice was that she was sentenced to solitude for life!  It was too monstrously, too incredibly wicked!

With what futile and bitter execration she murmured in her heart the word ‘If.’  If Cyril’s childish predilections had not been encouraged!  If he had only been content to follow his father’s trade!  If she had flatly refused to sign his indenture at Peel’s and pay the premium!  If he had not turned from, colour to clay!  If the art-master had not had that fatal ‘idea’!  If the judges for the competition had decided otherwise!  If only she had brought Cyril up in habits of obedience, sacrificing temporary peace to permanent security!

For after all he could not abandon her without her consent.  He was not of age.  And he would want a lot more money, which he could obtain from none but her.  She could refuse. ...

No!  She could not refuse.  He was the master, the tyrant.  For the sake of daily pleasantness she had weakly yielded to him at the start!  She had behaved badly to herself and to him.  He was spoiled.  She had spoiled him.  And he was about to repay her with lifelong misery, and nothing would deflect him from his course.  The usual conduct of the spoilt child!  Had she not witnessed it, and moralized upon it, in other families?

“You don’t seem very chirpy over it, mater!” he said.

She went out of the room.  His joy in the prospect of departure from the Five Towns, from her, though he masked it, was more manifest than she could bear.

The Signal, the next day, made a special item of the news.  It appeared that no National Scholarship had been won in the Five Towns for eleven years.  The citizens were exhorted to remember that Mr. Povey had gained his success in open competition with the cleverest young students of the entire kingdom—­and in a branch of art which he had but recently taken up; and further, that the Government offered only eight scholarships each year.  The name of Cyril Povey passed from lip to lip.  And nobody who met Constance, in street or shop, could refrain from informing her that she ought to be a proud mother, to have such a son, but that truly they were not surprised ... and how proud his poor father would have been!  A few sympathetically hinted that maternal pride was one of those luxuries that may cost too dear.