Culpeper crossed the floor
hastily and put her arms about her son's shoulders. 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. 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.
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