An outraged instinct of possession was rising in Reardon. Esther suddenly meant more to him than she had in all this time when she had been meaning a great deal. Alston Choate had power to rouse this primitive rage in him, but he could always conquer it by reasoning that Alston wouldn't take her if he could get her. There were too many inherited reserves in Alston. Actually, Reardon thought, Alston wouldn't really want a woman he had to take unguardedly. But here was the man who, by every rigour of conventional life, had a right to her. It could hardly be borne. Reardon wasn't used to finding himself dominated by primal impulses. They weren't, his middle-aged conclusions told him, safe. But now he got away from himself slightly and the freedom of it, while it was exciting, made him ill at ease. The impulse to speak really got the better of him.
"Look here, Blake," he said—and both of them realised that it was the first time he had used that surname; Jeff had always been a boy to him—"it's very unwise of you to come back here at all."
"Very unwise?" Jeff repeated, in an unmixed amazement, "to come back to Addington? My father's here."
"Your father needn't have been here," pursued Reardon doggedly. Entered upon what seemed a remonstrance somebody ought to make, he was committed, he thought, to going on. "It was an exceedingly ill-judged move for you all, very ill-judged indeed."
Jeff sat looking at him from a sternness that made a definite setting for the picture of his wonder. Yet he seemed bent only upon understanding.
"I don't say you came back to make trouble," Reardon went on, pursued now by the irritated certainty that he had adopted a course and had got to justify it. "But you're making it."
"Why, you're making her damned uncomfortable."
"Who?"
Reardon had boggled over the name. He hardly liked to say Esther again, since it had been ill-received, and he certainly wouldn't say "your wife". But he had to choose and did it at a jump.