From her quarter of the table she pushed crockery towards Rachel with
a gesture of disillusion; the courage to smile had been but momentary.
She felt old--older than she had ever felt before. The young
generation presented themselves to her as almost completely enigmatic.
She admitted that they were foreign to her, that she could not
comprehend them at all. Each of the three at her table was entirely
free and independent--each could and did act according to his or her
whim, and none could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They
were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of
times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested
against the banal complaint that the world had changed of late years.
But now she felt grievously that the world was different--that it
had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the
modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued
by too long a spell of the shrillness and the _naïveté_ of a
family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when,
with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to
Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely
leaving her in the lurch, announce his departure for South Africa,
with as much calm as though South Africa were in the next street?...
And the other two were guilty in other ways, perhaps more subtly, of
treason against forlorn old age.

And then Louis, in taking the slop-basin from her trembling
fingers, to pass it to Rachel, gave her one of his adorable, candid,
persuasive, sympathetic smiles. And lo! she was enheartened once more.
And she remembered that dignity and kindliness had been the watchwords
of her whole life, and that it would be shameful to relinquish the
struggle for an ideal at the very threshold of the grave. She began to
find excuses for Julian. The dear lad must have many business worries.