"You don't know them."
"But I want to, Nancy."
"But if the man is what you said——"
"He's not an outcast, my dear, and if he were——"
She was silent, but the air was filled with her voiceless and somewhat sullen objections. Theresa fidgeted.
"You must do as you please, of course," Nancy said at last.
"Not if it displeases you."
"Why should it?"
He gestured dumbly, and something fell between them like a filmy veil. It spoilt Theresa's evening, and when she went to bed she wondered what was happening downstairs in the breakfast-room, where the quiet was broken now and then by the hooting of tugs in the docks and the voices of those people who had not gone to church, and walked instead in New Dock Road. Did her father and mother talk? Were they quarrelling, or, now the children had gone to bed, was she sitting on his knee? There was a lump of anxiety in her throat: the world had so many places of darkness and uncertainty; she felt herself groping among dangers, and she hoped her mother was not crying. She undressed slowly, thoughtfully, but as she brushed her hair before the looking-glass she became interested in the vision of her own pale face, and for a moment she forgot her trouble.
"Grace," she said, "what do you think of my head?"