Chương Chương 34 · THE BARRIER

. THE BARRIER

That gift of laughter of his seemed utterly extinguished. For once there

was no gleam of humour in those dark eyes, as they continued to consider

her with that queer stare of scrutiny. And yet, though his gaze was

sombre, his thoughts were not. With his cruelly true mental vision which

pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation--which

properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed--he perceived

the grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment

he experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang

entirely from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all

things considered, the more or less accidental fact that she had brought

him into the world could establish between them any real bond at this

time of day! The motherhood that bears and forsakes is less than animal.

He had considered this; he had been given ample leisure in which to

consider it during those long, turbulent hours in which he had been

forced to wait, because it would have been almost impossible to have won

across that seething city, and certainly unwise to have attempted so to

do.

He had reached the conclusion that by consenting to go to her rescue

at such a time he stood committed to a piece of purely sentimental

quixotry. The quittances which the Mayor of Meudon had exacted from him

before he would issue the necessary