“Ah, don’t talk like that, Peter,” she said. “You’re not a newspaper reporter.”
Peter gave no reply at all. There he sat with his chin on his knees, quite silent.... If Silvia chose to speak to him like that it was clear that she must either go on or draw back; anyhow, the next word was with her. But all the time that he thus tacitly insisted on his rights, resenting what she had said, there was within him some little focus of light breaking through from her sunlit altitudes that illumined and justified her protest. Good Lord, wasn’t she right? Wasn’t his sentiment towards his father immeasurably ignoble compared to the comprehension of her love? And that very fact—his own unavowable condemnation of himself, that is to say—irritated him. If she was like that there was no use in his continuing his story.
Silvia spoke first. Humanly, she could not bear this silence in which Peter seemed to mock her, but divinely she must be ever so humble.... Humble? How love sanctified humility and transformed it into an ineffable pride. She pushed back her chair and knelt by his. She longed to unclasp the brown lean hands that enclosed him in himself and make them embrace her also. But that might annoy Peter: there was a suggestion of “claiming” him about it. She did not want to claim him.
“I don’t know why I spoke like that,” she said. “I asked you what happened, and you are telling me. Will you forgive me and go on?”
Peter had never seemed so remote from her as then. In the frantic telegraphy of her spirit, which seemed to be sending all the love that the waves of ether would bear, there came no response from him, in spite of his answer. “I never heard such nonsense,” he said. “We should be a pretty pair if we had to forgive. How silly—you know it—to ask me to forgive you.”
“Show you do, by going on,” she said.
It was clear to him that what she wanted was to know not his father’s part in this interview, but his own. Whether she liked it or not, he was going to be perfectly honest about it.
“When he knocked over a chair and strode about,” he repeated, “and found out the reason for my mother’s going away, I began to be less sorry for him. He enjoyed himself: it was all a tribute to his impossible greatness. From then onwards I acted, because he was acting. The alternative was to tell him that my mother simply found his egoism intolerable. That wouldn’t have done any good, so I agreed with him: that was the best thing to do. He is in despair, a rather luxurious despair. I had either to explode that or let him enjoy it. So it was no use being sorry for him any longer.”
Silvia broke out again; it was her love for Peter that spoke.
“My dear, you ought to have been a million times sorrier,” she cried. “If he had been just simply broken-hearted about it, it would have been so much better. Can’t you see that? Can you help feeling it?” She was shedding the gleam on him.