“Ah, that again—­that makes it worse!”

“Worse?”

“Just as your goodness does, your sweetness, your immense indulgence in letting me discuss things with you in a way that must seem almost an impertinence.”

Mrs. Quentin’s smile was not without irony.  “You must remember that I do it for Alan.”

“That’s what I love you for!” the girl instantly returned; and again her tone touched her listener.

“And yet you’re sacrificing him—­and to an idea!”

“Isn’t it to ideas that all the sacrifices that were worth while have been made?”

“One may sacrifice one’s self.”

Miss Fenno’s color rose.  “That’s what I’m doing,” she said gently.

Mrs. Quentin took her hand.  “I believe you are,” she answered.  “And it isn’t true that I speak only for Alan.  Perhaps I did when I began; but now I want to plead for you too—­against yourself.”  She paused, and then went on with a deeper note:  “I have let you, as you say, speak your mind to me in terms that some women might have resented, because I wanted to show you how little, as the years go on, theories, ideas, abstract conceptions of life, weigh against the actual, against the particular way in which life presents itself to us—­to women especially.  To decide beforehand exactly how one ought to behave in given circumstances is like deciding that one will follow a certain direction in crossing an unexplored country.  Afterward we find that we must turn out for the obstacles—­cross the rivers where they’re shallowest—­take the tracks that others have beaten—­make all sorts of unexpected concessions.  Life is made up of compromises:  that is what youth refuses to understand.  I’ve lived long enough to doubt whether any real good ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more beautiful theories.  Do I seem casuistical?  I don’t know—­there may be losses either way...but the love of the man one loves...of the child one loves... that makes up for everything....”

She had spoken with a thrill which seemed to communicate itself to the hand her listener had left in hers.  Her eyes filled suddenly, but through their dimness she saw the girl’s lips shape a last desperate denial: 

“Don’t you see it’s because I feel all this that I mustn’t—­that I can’t?”

III

Mrs. Quentin, in the late spring afternoon, had turned in at the doors of the Metropolitan Museum.  She had been walking in the Park, in a solitude oppressed by the ever-present sense of her son’s trouble, and had suddenly remembered that some one had added a Beltraffio to the collection.  It was an old habit of Mrs. Quentin’s to seek in the enjoyment of the beautiful the distraction that most of her acquaintances appeared to find in each other’s company.  She had few friends, and their society was welcome to her only in her more superficial moods; but she could drug anxiety with a picture as some women can soothe it with a bonnet.