He noticed that, though there was no relapse from the correctness of her accent, she was using just such phrases as she might have used had she never quitted her native Turnhill. He looked round the lamp at her furtively, and seemed to see in her shadowed face a particular local quality of sincerity and downrightness that appealed strongly to his admiration. (Yet ten years earlier he had considered her markedly foreign to the Five Towns.) That this quality should have survived in her was a proof to him that she was a woman unique. Unique she had been, and unique she still remained. He did not know that he had long ago lost for ever the power of seeing her with a normal vision. He imagined in his simplicity, which disguised itself as chill critical impartiality, that he was adding her up with clear-sighted shrewdness... And then she was a mother! That meant a mysterious, a mystic perfecting! For him, it was as if among all women she alone had been a mother—so special was his view of the influence of motherhood upon her. He drew together all the beauty of an experience almost universal, transcendentalised it, and centred it on one being. And he was disturbed, baffled, agitated by the effect of the secret workings of his own unsuspected emotion. He was made sad, and sadder. He wanted to right wrongs, to efface from hearts the memory of grief, to create bliss; and he knew that this could never be done. He now saw Hilda exclusively as a victim, whose misfortunes were innumerable. Imagine this creature, with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night! Imagine her solitary in the awful house—with the broker’s man! Imagine her forced to separate herself from her child! Imagine the succession of disasters that had soured her and transformed seriousness into harshness and acridity! ... And within that envelope, what a soul must be burning!
“And when he begins to grow—he’s scarcely begun to grow yet,” Hilda continued about her offspring, “then he will need all his strength!”
“Yes, he will,” Edwin concurred heartily.
He wanted to ask her, “Why did you call him Edwin for his second name? Was it his father’s name, or your father’s, or did you insist on it yourself, because—?” But he could not ask. He could ask nothing. He could not even ask why she had jilted him without a word. He knew naught, and evidently she was determined to give no information. She might at any rate have explained how she had come to meet Janet, and under what circumstances Janet had taken possession of the child. All was a mystery. Her face, when he avoided the lamp, shone in the midst of a huge dark cloud of impenetrable mystery. She was too proud to reveal anything whatever. The grand pride in her forbade her even to excuse her conduct to himself. A terrific woman!
Four.
Silence fell. His constraint was excruciating. She too was nervous, tapping the table and creaking her chair. He could not speak.
“Shall you be going back to Bursley soon?” she demanded. In her voice was desperation.
“Oh yes!” he said, thankfully eager to follow up any subject. “On Monday, I expect.”
“I wonder if you’d mind giving Janet a little parcel from me—some things of George’s? I meant to send it by post, but if you—”