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Rh him from behind a drawn blind. Mrs. Royce had always looked old, even long ago when she used to come into church with her little girls, a tiny woman in tiny high-heeled shoes and a big hat with nodding plumes, her black dress covered with bugles and jet that glittered and rattled and made her seem hard on the outside, like an insect.

Yes, he must see to it that Enid went about and saw more of other people. She was too much with her mother, and with her own thoughts. Flowers and foreign missions her garden and the great kingdom of China; there was something unusual and touching about her preoccupations. Something quite charming, too. Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of “Paradise Lost” was as mythical as the “Odyssey”; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn’t have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man.