“No one has the least idea,” he responded. “I wish I could do something for them. But I don’t see how I can.”

His mother looked mischievously and affectionately at him.

Suddenly, coming round the table, she kissed him with a series of little birdlike pecks. “There’s no one like my Lambkin,” she said lightly, “for being too good to live!”

Having thus given him the feeling⁠—how well he knew it!⁠—that the very deepest stretch of his spirit only appeared as a pretty little pet-dog trick to her cynical maternal eroticism, she went back again, round the table, to her seat.

She drank more tea after that and ate more bread-and-butter, and Wolf received the impression that his obvious concern over Mattie and Olwen had for some reason given her a deep sense of satisfaction.