Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends,
as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had
never thought about anything in all her life for more than half an
hour--and it had always turned out remarkably well.

Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go
on telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?

"I wish sometimes," his mother said abruptly, with an unusually
sharp note in her voice, "that you wouldn't look quite so like your
father."

"But I'm NOT like my father!" said Benham puzzled.

"No," she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer
reason, "so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED
expression. . . ."

She jumped to her feet. "Poff," she said, "I want to go and see the
evening primroses pop. You and I are talking nonsense. THEY don't
have ideas anyhow. They just pop--as God meant them to do. What
stupid things we human beings are!"

Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.



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