Urquhart, who in their hearts hate women. It was sheer madness your ever picking up this Torp girl. If Ann hadn’t been such a feather-headed fool she’d have stopped you! Ann is so full of her own pranks, that you’re just a pet to her, a great baby-pet! If Ann had been a different sort of person, you’d never have got mixed up with these Malakites. I told her myself what would come of it! I told her in my own drawing-room, while Emma was spoiling the teacakes, that day she called on me. I said to her, ‘If you can’t keep your boy from that bookshop he’ll go the way his father went!’ That’s what I said to her. I remember it because I was unkind to Emma afterwards about the teacakes! But Ann only laughed. That mother of yours doesn’t any more know the difference between good and evil than between⁠—” The excited woman broke off in a half-humorous chuckle.

But before this diatribe had finished, Wolf had pulled in his legs and straightened his back. Something deeper in him than the grin of that skull down there, deeper than the drowsy deliciousness of the day, twitched, contracted, tightened. The ancient, unconscious tug of the navel-string, or what bound his flesh to the flesh that had conceived it, roused him from his torpor.