Poor Juley on her side had no such compensations. Besides, she lacked the saving hardness of youth. She too was sorrowfully puzzled by the turn things had taken. Life had been so very sweet to her for a little immediately after Joanna’s home-coming. She had rejoiced in what she described to Eva Gedge as “the softening influence of sorrow,” had welcomed the passing simplicity that grief brings. Bereaved Joanna had been very loving and so gentle that to the mother it seemed as if “a real change of heart” must have taken place. The two had been more nearly united than ever before.

But these first days – or were they only hours? – had passed all too quickly for Juley into a treasured memory. And now she saw her dear child, dearer now than ever, drifting farther from her and from grace: becoming, as the years passed, more and more worldly and pleasure-loving.

If Juley faltered at times in this view, letting her natural maternal pride have the upper hand, or excusing her daughter’s youth, there was Eva Gedge, and Eva knew how to apply the spur. Such an experience as Joanna had been through, said Eva, must lead either to heart-whole dedication or to a more callous resistance. And to know in which direction Joanna was moving, had not one merely to look at the friends she chose for herself? This was an accusation to which Juley had no answer but a sigh.

Eva’s graceless part, indeed, was to forment whatever was mean and sterile, and to drag down all that was fine and productive, in a contest which, let alone, had little of baseness in it. Like Mabel, she was essentially a divider. Barren of life herself, her deepest passion was to balk and defeat the entering of others into life.

Not that she was herself aware of her role, nor that others, seeing her warm show of interest in the face of Joanna’s cold politeness, would easily have guessed it. She was always the first to smile, with Christian cordiality, when Juley tried to bring daughter and friend to a better understanding. And though it sorely irked her, she almost always refrained from putting into words her constant disparagement of Joanna’s natural qualities. Often she wore a martyred air. And truly enough there was martyrdom to her envious nature in Juley’s mounting pride in the younger woman.

As for Joanna, she had become angry with a kind of scornful jealousy. She knew that Eva’s influence was hateful. She knew that her mother, in the deep, human part of herself, was glad that she, Joanna, could no more love Eva than Eva could help envying her. Yet she was helpless. And whenever she had been the subject of a prayerful conference between them, she writhed anew under the reinforcement of authority in her mother’s voice, and under the malign gleam that darted from the prominent, black eyes behind Eva’s glasses.