Wolf sighed. “Sometimes I’ve fancied, Mother, that you’d got some secret philosophy of your own that made you wiser than anyone⁠ ⁠… wise as some great sorceress.”

“Your father thought me a hard, selfish, conventional woman, without an idea in her head. And that’s what I probably am at bottom, Wolf!” She paused, and her face grew flinty. “I can never forgive him for destroying our life. What’s the use of that sort of folly? What’s the use of tilting against conventions? It’s more amusing, it’s more interesting, to play with those things. They’re as real as anything else.”

“What do you actually want out of life, then, Mother?” His tone was naive and pedantic. And he felt naive and pedantic, as he looked at this woman, the contours of whose countenance were as defiant to ordinary emotions as dark, slippery rocks to the wash of the sea.