suavity over the hard angles of youth.

But Mrs. Peyton's real excuse was after all one which she would never have
given. It was because her intimacy with her son was the one need of her
life that she had, with infinite tact and discretion, but with equal
persistency, clung to every step of his growth, dissembling herself,
adapting herself, rejuvenating herself in the passionate effort to be
always within reach, but never in the way.

Denis Peyton had died after seven years of marriage, when his boy was
barely six. During those seven years he had managed to squander the best
part of the fortune he had inherited from his step-brother; so that, at his
death, his widow and son were left with a scant competence. Mrs. Peyton,
during her husband's life, had apparently made no effort to restrain his
expenditure. She had even been accused by those judicious persons who are
always ready with an estimate of their neighbours' motives, of having
encouraged poor Denis's improvidence for the gratification of her own
ambition. She had in fact, in the early days of their marriage, tried to
launch him in politics, and had perhaps drawn somewhat heavily on his funds
in the first heat of the contest; but the experiment ending in failure, as
Denis Peyton's experiments were apt to end, she had made no farther demands
on his exchequer. Her personal tastes were in fact unusually simple, but
her outspoken indifference to money was not, in the opinion of her critics,
designed to act as a check upon her husband; and it resulted in leaving
her, at his death, in straits from which it was impossible not to deduce a
moral.

Her small means, and the care of the boy's education, served the widow as
a pretext for secluding herself in a socially remote suburb, where it was
inferred that she was expiating, on queer food and in ready-made boots, her