His mother’s personality filled his mind completely, as he passed Pimpernel’s and steered his way through the Saturday crowds in High Street. “Her nature’s never had its proper fling,” he thought. “No wonder she treats people carelessly and ironically. She’s like a great lioness whose only food for years has been rats and mice and skimmed milk! The mere brutality of that fellow appeals to her. At least it’s something formidable and positive. I wonder”⁠—here he paused on the pavement, just as he debouched into Chequers Street⁠—“whether she lets the brute kiss her.” As this thought began to transform itself into an impious, unseemly image, he pushed a sprig of greenery of some kind that someone had dropped there, with the end of his stick, along the pavement, till he got it into an empty little space behind some railings, where a patch of grass was growing. “God!” he said to himself as he recognized this spot; “this is where I read her letter the day I ate Yorkshire pudding at the Torps’, and she first spoke about coming down here! If I hadn’t sat by Gerda that day and eaten that Yorkshire pudding and taken her up to Poll’s Camp⁠ ⁠… I’d have been free now⁠ ⁠… to⁠ ⁠… to⁠—” At that point he tossed his thought away from him. “It’s no good,” he said to himself. “When Chance has once started things, a sort of fate sets in that a person