"And anyhow, we can slope now, without being noticed," Sylvia understood the accent and tone of this passage more than the exact words, but it summed up and brought home to her in a cruelly clarified form her own groping impressions.

He was attached to Lovaina as a child to his mothera wayward, jealous, cloudy-minded child, who almost daily broke into fits of anger over incidents misunderstood by his groping mentality, and because of his incommunicable feelings.

It was not weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the word which would fit her changed mood.