seen meant nothing but a rude flirtation; Annie's blood told her
differently. If she had merely heard of the matter her lack of
visualising power would have saved her from sensation; it was the sight
of those two striving figures which had made her feel. She moaned that
her baby son had grown up and away from her, and she agonised over his
soul, which she had planned to wrest for the Lord during the coming
revival--small heed would she get Archelaus to pay to his soul now this
new thing was opening before him. Her mind was conscious of a great
emptiness where her scheme for the salvation of Archelaus had been
waxing.

Annie had about as much true moral sense as a cat. Her quarrel with
Archelaus was not that, in a wayside copse, with some girl, Jennifer or
another, he was learning as fact what he had long known in theory; the
chastity of a man, even of her beloved son, meant very little to her.
Terrible things, far worse than the casual mating of a man and a maid,
happen in the country, and it needed something keenly sharpened to make
Annie's dulled sensitiveness feel a shock. She raged that her son was
taken from her, but she would have felt indignant anger if the girl had
denied her lovely boy. And behind her sense of loss in Archelaus, behind
her terror that he was being led in the way of destruction, there
lurked, unknown to her, another anger, an anger against life. Some last
remnant of femininity cried out because for her it was all over--gone
the shudderings and the fierce delights.... Suddenly she felt intensely
old, and she collapsed from her kneeling attitude on to her heels and
sat there slackly. Youth is so confident that it can never grow old, and
then one day unthinking middle age awakens and finds that it has become
so.

Then stirred in Annie the outraged feeling of a parent, which says that