 taking in something still
other and larger than her demand of a moment before. It wasn't at once that he
could see all that was in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself
just checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest approach
his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything Mrs. Pocock had failed to
give a sign of recognising in Chad as a particular part of a transformation -
everything that had lent intention to this particular failure - affected him as
gathered into a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The
missile made him to that extent catch his breath; which however he presently
recovered. »Why when a woman's at once so charming and so beneficent -«
    »You can sacrifice mothers and sisters to her without a blush, and can make
them cross the ocean on purpose to feel the more, and take from you the
straighter, how you do it?«
    Yes, she had taken him up as short and as sharply as that; but he tried not
to flounder in her grasp. »I don't think there's anything I've done in any such
calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a sort of
indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to
my having come before you, and my having come was a result of our general state
of mind. Our general state of mind had proceeded, on its side, from our queer
ignorance, our queer misconceptions and confusions - from which, since then, an
inexorable tide of light seems to have floated us into our perhaps still queerer
knowledge. Don't you like your brother as he is,« he went on, »and haven't you
given your mother an intelligible account of all that that comes to?«
    It put to her also, doubtless, his own tone, too many things; this at least
would have been the case hadn't his final challenge directly helped her.
Everything, at the stage they had reached, directly helped her, because
everything betrayed in him such a basis of intention. He saw - the odd way
things came out! - that he would have been held less monstrous had he only been
a little wilder. What exposed him was just his poor old trick of quiet
inwardness, what exposed him was his thinking such offence. He hadn't in the
least however the desire to irritate that Sarah imputed to him, and he could
only at last temporise, for the moment, with her indignant view
