"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.