“The things that matter, to you, do matter so very much?”
She nodded. “Ford knows that he doesn’t care about anything in the world one quarter as much as I care about Cecil’s little finger. And I think he wants to care—he wants to come alive.”
“Won’t Diana Grierson-Amberly help him to come alive, now?”
Rose looked at him, as though to see if he were really in earnest, and then uttered a derisive laugh.
“He’ll go down among the dead men for ever and ever now,” she asserted sweepingly. “But they’ll have Aviolet babies, and one of them will cut out my Cecil, thank goodness, and carry on the Squires traditions.”
“You don’t want Squires for your boy?”
“Part of me does, perhaps,” she confessed. “When I see how safe and solid it all is, you know, and when I think of what it means to be poor, and always hard up, and more or less in debt. But I know all the time, really, that Ces would never belong. Not altogether. After all, he’s half Smith. And if you don’t belong, well, it’s like Ford. You’re shamming and struggling and captive, all at the same time. And that’s awful.”
“You are very wise,” said Charlesbury slowly.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“Indeed, I’m not. But I do want you, very much, to be wiser still. Won’t you, for Cecil’s sake, compromise, and come back to Squires for a little while?”