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about the room, while Clive sitting a little behind her, radiant perhaps, but still haggard, watched them with an intentness under which his mother still seemed to hear that heavy beating of his heart. Meretricious, frivolous, trivial—that was what Hester was thinking her; the smug, sheltered, upholstered, late-Victorian woman; reared on obsolete traditions, sustained by a doomed social system, buttressed by old china and mezzotints of simpering ancestresses. She could not remember anything that Hester had said at this first interview; she could only remember her assessing silence; but never, never to her dying day, would she forget the minute yet portentous incident that she had witnessed after they left her. She had gone to the window to watch them as they walked away in the little slip of garden beneath the flats, and she saw Clive bend his head to speak to the girl, as though in pleading or reassurance and that, for all response, not looking at him, she had laid hold of the hem of his coat, staying herself on him, or staying him on her, as she walked beside him. Their unity could not have been made more piercingly apparent to the mother’s fierce eyes watching from above. Hester’s possessorship of her son was rivetted upon her mind by the unemotional little gesture. Not