men who exist in order to keep the human tide in movement. Their opinions
matter principally because without them the opinions of other men would not
exist. Their function is to provoke. And from the time he was a babe in the
nursery Coryston had fulfilled it to perfection.

He himself would have told you he was simply the reaction from his mother.
And indeed, although from the time he had achieved trousers their joint
lives had been one scene of combat, they were no sooner in presence of each
other than the strange links between them made themselves felt no less than
the irreconcilable differences.

Now, indeed, as, after a few bantering remarks to his mother on his recent
political escapades--remarks which she took in complete silence--he settled
himself in a high chair in front of her to listen to what she had to
say, no subtle observer of the scene but must have perceived the
likeness--through all contrast--between mother and son. Lady Coryston was
tall, large-boned, thin to emaciation, imposing--a Lady Macbeth of the
drawing-room. Coryston was small, delicately finished, a whimsical snippet
of a man--on wires--never at ease--the piled fair hair overbalancing the
face and the small, sarcastic chin. And yet the essential note of both
physiognomies, of both aspects, was the same. _Will_--carried to
extremes, absorbing and swallowing up the rest of the personality. Lady
Coryston had handed on the disease of her own character to her son, and it
was in virtue of what she had given him that she had made him her enemy.

Her agitation in his presence, in spite of her proud bearing, was indeed
evident, at least to Marcia. Marcia read her; had indeed been compelled
to read her mother--the movements of hand and brow, the tricks of
expression--from childhood up. And she detected, from various signs of
nervousness, that Lady Coryston expected a rough time.