consider for a moment such possibilities as we have been talking
of."

"Wrong? Why should it be wrong?"

"Because I shall want to keep my boy always! Not, of course, in the
sense of living with him, or even forming an important part of his
life; I am not deluded enough to think that possible. But I do
believe it possible never to pass wholly out of his life; and while
there is a hope of that, how can I leave him?" She paused, and
turned on him a new face, a face in which the past of which he was
still so ignorant showed itself like a shadow suddenly darkening a
clear pane. "How can I make you understand?" she went on urgently.
"It is not only because of my love for him--not only, I mean,
because of my own happiness in being with him; that I can't, in
imagination, surrender even the remotest hour of his future; it is
because, the moment he passes out of my influence, he passes under
that other--the influence I have been fighting against every hour
since he was born!--I don't mean, you know," she added, as Durham,
with bent head, continued to offer the silent fixity of his
attention, "I don't mean the special personal influence--except
inasmuch as it represents something wider, more general, something
that encloses and circulates through the whole world in which he
belongs. That is what I meant when I said you could never
understand! There is nothing in your experience--in any American
experience--to correspond with that far-reaching family
organization, which is itself a part of the larger system, and which
encloses a young man of my son's position in a network of accepted
prejudices and opinions. Everything is prepared in advance--his
political and religious convictions, his judgments of people, his