And if I were not his mother I should fall in love with him myself!" Catherine looked down on me as she returned from replacing Bob's photograph on the mantelpiece.

The humour had gone out of her eye; in its place was an almost animal glitter, a far harder light than had accompanied the significant reference to the patriotic impulse which she had nipped in the bud.

It was probably only the old, old look of the lioness whose whelp is threatened, but it was something new to me in Catherine Evers, something half-repellent and yet almost wholly fine.
"You don't mean to say it's that ?" I asked aghast.
"No, I don't," Catherine answered, with a hard little laugh.

"He's not quite twenty, remember; but I am afraid that he is making a fool of himself, and I want it stopped." I waited for more, merely venturing to nod my sympathetic concern.
"Poor old Bob, as you may suppose, is not a genius.

He is far too nice," declared Catherine's old self, "to be anything so nasty.