Lady Brent was struck by her entire absence of jealousy. She might have felt sad that the healing process had not been all her own work. It showed how unselfishly she loved him, and how sure she was of him.
"Jane is a loyal little soul," she said. "She will be very pleased to hear from you, I know." She smiled at Viola. "The one thing I never quite gauged at its proper value was the companionship of young people. I think now that he ought to have had more of it. But he seemed so happy, with all his own pursuits."
"Oh, he was happy, I know," she said, eagerly. "It is wonderful to hear him talk of his life at Royd. Perhaps I'm not altogether sorry I was nearly the first, because I got it all. Harry isn't like anybody else that ever lived. He's wonderful. He couldn't have been quite the same if he hadn't been brought up always in that beautiful place, and left a great deal to himself and the woods and the hills and the sea."
"I am glad you think of it like that," said Lady Brent. "But I have been troubled by something he said to me when he first came home. His upbringing has made him what he is, but there are many things it didn't prepare him for. I think he was dreading going out again, as an officer. He doesn't know other young men of his class. He is so different from them, and they want everybody to be alike. With the men of simpler lives that he has lived with and fought with he would have made his way more easily."
"Yes," said Viola. "I was very sad at first to think of him thrown into that rough hard life, but I needn't have been. And I think now he is happier about the other."
She looked at Wilbraham, who said: "We've had it out, we three together. It's not as serious as you have been thinking. You must remember that he hasn't been with young men of his own sort at all; and in the ranks of course he'd look at them from another angle altogether; and perhaps he wouldn't like everything he saw about them—his officers, I mean. That's all it is, really—a diffidence about how he's going to fit in with them. But of course he'll make his way, with the other subalterns and people, just as he did with the men. There's so much character in him, as well as everything that young men do value in each other. I think we persuaded him that he'd be a good deal better off than he has been, didn't we, Viola?"
"Oh, he didn't want very much persuasion. He said he had been worrying himself about things that didn't really matter. But he was so much happier about everything when he came back from Royd. I don't think even I could have done that—not alone. It would just have been we two, keeping out of the world together. And poor Harry is in the world now."
"Yes," said Wilbraham, "and well fitted to cope with it. Of course it came as a shock to him at first. It would have done that anyhow, and he would have had to square his accounts with it by himself, before he could have felt himself at his ease. We couldn't have helped him. If you're still troubling yourself about having made mistakes, dear lady, I don't think you need. You made very few. You forged the good steel in him, but it had to be tempered."
This view of it comforted her. "We shall all be very happy now," she said.
When they had talked a little longer, Bastian came in.