Her romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through imagination, with the edge of reality.
And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that something had broken down within his soul--some barrier between himself and humanity.

The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet.

Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part.

For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm.

Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a coffin.
With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father.