It was a girlish gesture that she often made, but it looked awful and grotesque, masked as she was in that ugly respirator.It’s really an awful bore being held hostage by mad geniuses and threatened with this or that in order to make one’s mother do their evil bidding. It sometimes seems as if never a week goes by without some reprobate or other pointing a revolving pistol or a Changeling-spore disseminator at me and insisting that Mother share with him some ancient secret or other. It makes a chap feel a little hard-done-by, and inclined to ask, ‘Am I a boy, or a mere bargaining counter?’ And then there’s always the worry that one day, when asked to choose between the safety of her Art and the future of the Solar System, she might plump for the Solar System for a change …But this time, she chose neither, for that few seconds of thinking time had been enough for her to see a way out of our predicament. She tore off her mask and declared, ‘Gentlemen, you forget yourselves!
