"New as the garden of Eden.

I'm in love." "O Pete!" his mother cried, and the purest, most conventional maternal agony was in the tone.

For an instant, crushed and terrified, she looked at him; and then something gay and impish appeared in her eyes, and she asked with a grin: "Is it some one perfectly awful ?" "I'm afraid you'll think so.

She's a sheltered, young, luxurious child, with birth, breeding, and money, everything you hate most." "O Pete!" she said again, but this time with a sort of sad resignation.
Then shaking her head as if to say that she wasn't, after all, as narrow as he thought, she hitched her chair nearer the table and said eagerly, "Well, tell me all about it." Wayne looked down at his mother as she sat opposite him, with her elbows on the table, as keen as a child and as lively as a cricket.

He asked himself if he had not drifted into a needlessly sentimental state of mind about her.