Her face was very motherly and there was a compassionate light in her eyes, "My dear, dear boy," she murmured in the soothing tone that one uses to the ill or the mentally unbalanced.

"My dear boy, you must really go and dress.

Julia will never forgive us." In her heart she was sincerely grieved by what he had told her.

She would have helped cheerfully if it had been possible to her nature; but stronger than compassion, stronger even than reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had bred.

He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined face, that even if he took her with him to that basement room, she would see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be.