“Yes.”
“And left her? To you?”
“Yes. Left her to me.”
He raised his head with a backward jerk and stared out of the window before him. She kept her eyes on his face, measuring its strength against hers. He was not measuring. He seemed to be seeing the beautiful and terrible things of which, he had told her, she was capable. She felt, when his eyes came back to her, that he had judged her.
“You see you can’t,” he said gently.
“Can’t what? Can’t keep her, you mean, of course.”
“Anything but that. You can’t abandon her—even for my sake.”
So that had been the judgment. He saw only beauty. “I shan’t abandon her. I shall always be able to see as much of her as I did of Rhoda, and more. And she is different from Rhoda. I shan’t have the special joy of her, but I shall have the good.”
“Moreover,” he went on, with perfect gentleness, putting her words aside, “I can’t abandon Rhoda. All that you have said is true. But it doesn’t go far enough. You yourself, you know, see life too much in terms of irony, of fact rather than faith. You’ve owned that Rhoda is adventurous and honest; you’ve owned that she doesn’t lie to herself. Then she has growth in her. No human being can be like a flower or a fish or a stone. It was mere literature, your saying that. Every human being has futures and futures within it. You know it really. Why you yourself, though you are so old and fixed, are different now from what you were an hour ago. I am different, of course. And Rhoda will be different, too. She won’t disintegrate me. She’ll make me very miserable, doubtless; she has already. And I shall make her angry. But I shall hold her, and she’ll change. You shall see. I promise you. And you will keep Jane Amoret, and she will be eternally different because of you.”
Mrs. Delafield, while he spoke, had risen. She stood before him, grasping her gold chain on either side, her eyes very nearly level with his, and she summoned all her will, her strength, her wisdom to meet him. Yes, they had come to that, she and this boy.