So he rarely went back that far. He would go back to the Quidmores, to the Tollivants, to Mrs. Crewdson; but he stopped there. There he hung up a great curtain, soft and dim and pitiful, the veil of an immense tenderness. Rarely, very rarely, did he go behind it. He would not have done it on this afternoon had not the woman who had just gone out—dressed, as anyone could see, with the expensive easy-going roughness which only rich women can afford—neurotic, imperious, unhappy—had not this woman sent him there. She was a great lady whose tragic story haunted him; but she turned his mind backward, as it hardly ever turned, to the foolish and misguided soul who had loved him. No one since that time, no one whatever in the life he could remember, had loved him at all, unless it were Honey, and Honey denied that he did. How could he forsake ...? And then it came to him what it was that pleaded within him not to be forsaken.
The lecture was over. It was one of the first Tom had attended. The men, some hundred odd in number, were shuffling their papers, preparatory to getting up. Seated in an amphitheater, they filled the first seven or eight semicircles outward from the stage. The arrangement being alphabetical, Tom, as a W, was in the most distant row.
The lecturer, who was also putting his papers together as they lay on a table beside him, looked up casually to call out,
"If Mr. Whitelaw is here I should like to speak to him."
Tom shot from his seat and stood up. The man on his left did the same. Occupied with taking notes on the little table attached to the right arm—the only arm—of his chair, Tom had not turned to the left at all. He was surprised now at the ripple of laughter that ran among the men beginning to get up from their seats or to file out into the corridor. The professor smiled too.
"You're brothers?"
Tom looked at his neighbor; his neighbor looked at Tom. Except for the difference in height the resemblance was startling or amusing, as you chose to take it. To the men going by it was amusing.
It was the neighbor, however, who called out, in a shocked voice: "Oh, no, no! No connection."
"Then it's to Mr. Theodore Whitelaw that I wish to speak."