The Descent of Man and Other Stories

“Against the paper. She objects to me in my official capacity as owner of the Radiator.”

His mother did not echo his laugh.

“She had found a solution, of course—she overflows with expedients. I was to chuck the paper, and we were to live happily ever afterward on canned food and virtue. She even had an alternative ready—women are so full of resources! I was to turn the Radiator into an independent organ, and run it at a loss to show the public what a model newspaper ought to be. On the whole, I think she fancied this plan more than the other—it commended itself to her as being more uncomfortable and aggressive. It’s not the fashion nowadays to be good by stealth.”

Mrs. Quentin said to herself, “I didn’t know how much he cared!” Aloud she murmured, “You must give her time.”

“Time?”

“To move out the old prejudices and make room for new ones.”

“My dear mother, those she has are brand-new; that’s the trouble with them. She’s tremendously up-to-date. She takes in all the moral fashion-papers, and wears the newest thing in ethics.”

Her resentment lost its way in the intricacies of his metaphor. “Is she so very religious?”

“You dear archaic woman! She’s hopelessly irreligious; that’s the difficulty. You can make a religious woman believe almost anything: there’s the habit of credulity to work on. But when a girl’s faith in the Deluge has been shaken, it’s very hard to inspire her with confidence. She makes you feel that, before believing in you, it’s her duty as a conscientious agnostic to find out whether you’re not obsolete, or whether the text isn’t corrupt, or somebody hasn’t proved conclusively that you never existed, anyhow.”

Mrs. Quentin was again silent. The two moved in that atmosphere of implications and assumptions where the lightest word may shake down the dust of countless stored impressions; and speech was sometimes more difficult between them than had their union been less close.

Presently she ventured, “It’s impossible?”

“Impossible?”

She seemed to use her words cautiously, like weapons that might slip and inflict a cut. “What she suggests.”

Her son, raising himself, turned to look at her for the first time. Their glance met in a shock of comprehension. He was with her against the girl, then! Her satisfaction overflowed in a murmur of tenderness.

“Of course not, dear. One can’t change—change one’s life….”

“One’s self,” he emended. “That’s what I tell her. What’s the use of my giving up the paper if I keep my point of view?”

The psychological distinction attracted her. “Which is it she minds most?”

“Oh, the paper—for the present. She undertakes to modify the point of view afterward. All she asks is that I shall renounce my heresy: the gift of grace will come later.”

Mrs. Quentin sat gazing into her untouched cup. Her son’s first words had produced in her the hallucinated sense of struggling in the thick of a crowd that he could not see. It was horrible to feel herself hemmed in by influences imperceptible to him; yet if anything could have increased her misery it would have been the discovery that her ghosts had become visible.

As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked, “And you—?”

His answer carried the shock of an evocation. “I merely asked her what she thought of you.”

“Of me?”

“She admires you immensely, you know.”

For a moment Mrs. Quentin’s cheek showed the lingering light of girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the transmitter’s merit. “Well—?” she smiled.

“Well—you didn’t make my father give up the Radiator, did you?”

His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: “She never comes here. How can she know me?”

“She’s so poor! She goes out so little.” He rose and leaned against the mantelpiece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish ivories. “And then her mother—” he added, as if involuntarily.

“Her mother has never visited me,” Mrs. Quentin finished for him.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll. Her rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother’s sampler.”

“But the daughter is so modern—and yet—”

“The result is the same? Not exactly. She admires you—oh, immensely!” He replaced the bronze and turned to his mother with a smile. “Aren’t you on some hospital committee together? What especially strikes her is your way of doing good. She says philanthropy is not a line of conduct, but a state of mind —and it appears that you are one of the elect.”

As, in the vague diffusion of physical pain, relief seems to come with the acuter pang of a single nerve, Mrs. Quentin felt herself suddenly eased by a rush of anger against the girl. “If she loved you—” she began.

His gesture checked her. “I’m not asking you to get her to do that.”

The two were again silent, facing each other in the disarray of a common catastrophe—as though their thoughts, at the summons of danger, had rushed naked into action. Mrs. Quentin, at this revealing moment, saw for the first time how many elements of her son’s character had seemed comprehensible simply because they were