Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/22

 his father was a scamp. He was a half-orphan to whom she had been both mother and father, and her training (she thanked God again) had left its mark. Her son was a fine young man with no bad habits, smoking, drinking or otherwise, who, married to Naomi Potts (known throughout the churchgoing world as "the youngest missionary of God"), was himself spreading the light among the heathen of that newly discovered land between Victoria-Nyanza and the Indian Ocean. He and Naomi and a third missionary were the first in the field. "In blackest Africa" was the way she expressed it. "My son," she would say proudly, "who is head of a mission in blackest Africa."

No, she reflected frequently, it was impossible to think of Philip, so handsome, so clean, so pure, so virtuous, so molded by her own hand, as the son of Jason Downes. She had succeeded in everything save changing his appearance: he had the same rather feline good looks which had ruined his father by inducing women to fling themselves at his head. (It was a thing she could never understand—how any woman could fling herself at the head of a man, even a man as handsome as Jason had been.) 

The sight of the letter, so carelessly tossed aside by Essie, filled her with a sense of disappointment: if she had only received it at the proper time, she could have read it to the ladies of the Augusta Simpson Branch. Only an hour before she had "craved the indulgence" of the ladies while she read