‘I am aware, Henry,’ replied my mother calmly, ’that it is one of the fashions of the hour for young men of family to adopt the language of Radical newspapers.  In a country like this the affectation does no great harm, I grant, and my only serious objection to it is that it implies in young men of one’s own class a lack of originality which is a little humiliating.  I am aware that your cousin, Percy Aylwin, of Rington Manor, used to talk in the same strain as this, and ended by joining the Gypsies.  But I came to warn you, Henry, I came to urge you not to injure this poor girl’s reputation by such scenes as that I witnessed this morning.’

I remained silent.  The method of my mother’s attack had taken me by surprise.  Her sagacity was so much greater than mine, her power of fence was so much greater, her stroke was so much deadlier, that in all our encounters I had been conquered.

‘It is for the girl’s own sake that I speak to you,’ continued my mother.  ’She was deeply embarrassed at your method of address, and well she might be, seeing that it will be, for a long time to come, the subject of discussion in all the beer-houses which her father frequents.’

‘You speak as though she were answerable for her father’s faults,’ I said, with heat.

‘No,’ said my mother; ’but your father is the owner of Raxton Hall, which to her and her class is a kind of Palace of the Caesars.  You belong to a family famous all along the coast; you are well known to be the probable heir of one of the largest landowners in England; you may be something more important still; while she, poor girl, what is she that you should rush up to her before all the churchgoers of the parish and address her as Winifred?  The daughter of a penniless, drunken reprobate.  Every attention you pay her is but a slur upon her good name.’

‘There is not a lady in the county worthy to unlace her shoes,’ I cried, unguardedly.  Then I could have bitten off my tongue for saying so.

‘That may be,’ said my mother, with the quiet irony peculiar to her; ’but so monstrous are the customs of England, Henry, so barbaric is this society you despise, that she, whose shoes no lady in the county is worthy to unlace, is in an anomalous position.  Should she once again be seen talking familiarly with you, her character will have fled, and fled for ever.  It is for you to choose whether you are set upon ruining her reputation.’

I felt that what she said was true.  I felt also that Winifred herself had recognised the net of conventions that kept us apart in spite of that close and tender intimacy which had been the one great fact of our lives.  In a certain sense I was far more of a child of Nature than Winifred herself, inasmuch as, owing to my remarkable childish experience of isolation, I had imbibed a scepticism about the sanctity of conventions such as is foreign to the nature of woman, be she ever so unsophisticated, as Winifred’s shyness towards me had testified.