“But,” she went on from the height of her advantage, “I think I could let my own boy die if I thought that his happiness and well-­being were earned at the expense of another human being’s humiliation . . . or his being used. Yes, I could easily let him die. . . . But you see you are wrong . . . Neither of these two young men feel they are being humiliated or used by needing one another . . .”

“Needing one another!” Vance’s earlier anger had turned suddenly to outrage.

“Why do you think Gareth has suddenly found his speech? None of his other ‘attendants’ restored it to him! And haven’t you noticed a change in your brother too?”

Vance bowed his head.

“Mr. De Lakes, answer me.”

“Yes, yes.” He clenched his fists and simultaneously two tears stood in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Vaisey quieted down, “if we have been quarreling.”

“Why shouldn’t we quarrel? . . . After all I spent nearly five years trying to get my brother to come home to me, only to lose him to . . .”

“. . . a mindless invalid! Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

She rose.

“I did not say that, Mrs. Vaisey . . . Please excuse me . . .” He unconsciously extended his two hands toward her.

“Sidney may leave any time he wishes . . . Nobody is forcing him to remain here . . .”

A sudden fear now came over Vance that Sidney might lose his place with Gareth. His whole earlier position seemed about to be reversed, and his fear made him stutter badly before he could get out:

“I have only come here because I want the best for Sidney.

“I understand . . . But you will forgive me if I say that in Gareth he has found just that.”

Vance came to his feet. His mouth struggling with a whole army of words which he resolutely refused to release.

“We will leave everything just the way it is,” he said at last, “and part friends, then?”

She took his hands then in hers, and held them firmly in assent.

One afternoon, a week or so after Vance’s unsuccessful visit, Mrs. Vaisey, full of gloomy thoughts, absent-­minded and hardly knowing what she was doing, had come noiselessly upstairs. The door to Gareth’s room was open and the great billowing curtain, like one of her mother’s old brocade dresses, was fluttering in the pre-­twilight breeze. She looked within. She was as unprepared for the sight which met her eyes as she would have been to see her own face and form in her casket. Without knowing she was doing so, she entered the room.

Both Gareth and Sidney were naked, holding one another in furious embrace, their bodies covered with their mutual saliva from their kisses, each holding the sex of the other in open, abandoned, furiously moving mouths. Their immoderate pleasure, their almost unconscious bliss made them for some time unaware she stood there. It was Sidney who first loosened his hold on her son, but Gareth went on with his famished caressing of Sidney’s body.