through the railings at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward
over the window-sill on the first floor, stretching her eyes far up
and down the vista of sooty trees, hazy air, and drab house-facades,
along which echoed the noises common to a suburban main thoroughfare.

Somehow, her boy, with his aristocratic school-knowledge, his
grammars, and his aversions, was losing those wide infantine
sympathies, extending as far as to the sun and moon themselves, with
which he, like other children, had been born, and which his mother, a
child of nature herself, had loved in him; he was reducing their
compass to a population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people,
the mere veneer of a thousand million or so of others who did not
interest him at all. He drifted further and further away from her.
Sophy's milieu being a suburb of minor tradesmen and under-clerks,
and her almost only companions the two servants of her own house, it
was not surprising that after her husband's death she soon lost the
little artificial tastes she had acquired from him, and became--in
her son's eyes--a mother whose mistakes and origin it was his painful
lot as a gentleman to blush for. As yet he was far from being man
enough--if he ever would be--to rate these sins of hers at their true
infinitesimal value beside the yearning fondness that welled up and
remained penned in her heart till it should be more fully accepted by
him, or by some other person or thing. If he had lived at home with
her he would have had all of it; but he seemed to require so very
little in present circumstances, and it remained stored.

Her life became insupportably dreary; she could not take walks, and
had no interest in going for drives, or, indeed, in travelling
anywhere. Nearly two years passed without an event, and still she
looked on that suburban road, thinking of the village in which she