They were silent for a while, and then Rose said:
“Of course, you knew that was exactly what I should want most. You always understand. You see, the worst part of it all to me, almost, is to feel that I am partly responsible for Ces being what he is.”
Lucian frowned. “What, exactly, do you mean?”
Rose, cupping her face, now-a-days so innocent of rouge, in her hands, looked earnestly at him from where she sat on the low window-seat.
“Of course, I wasn’t educated, and I was much too young when I married Jim to know about eugenics and heredity and things,” she told him, “but that doesn’t really make me less responsible, does it? The Aviolets have always been all right—you’d expect them to be, of course—but Lord only knows what the Smith blood may have done for my poor Ces. You see, there wasn’t any tradition behind us, was there? Even Uncle A. did things in business that I expect you’d think pretty fishy, from an Aviolet point of view. And, somehow, Ces got born with just that Aviolet instinct left out of him.”
Lucian, walking up and down the long room, came to a sudden standstill before her. “Have they really made you believe that?”
“What?” She looked at him with wide eyes, as he resumed his pacing.
“Have they really made you believe that it’s the strain of your blood in Cecil’s veins that’s made him as he is? My dear, don’t you understand? It’s the Aviolet blood, not yours, that’s responsible. They’re decadent—rotten ... look at Ford. It’s the way, with these old, old families. They intermarry, always with other old, old families, reproducing the same type again and again. You’ve seen the picture of the Spanish ancestress, that Ford is so like? She was probably the saving of them, in her day. They must have died out, or become hopelessly degenerate, but for that one lapse of Sir Basil Aviolet that brought a fresh stock. You can tell that it was a vigorous strain—the physical type that’s persisted to this very day in Ford. But she couldn’t do more than give him her physical characteristics, and a twist to his mentality that’s Latin—nearly the lowest type of Latin, mind you—a middle-class Spaniard. She couldn’t save him, or any of them, altogether. Look at those two boys—Ford and Jim. Poor Jim drank, and did other things as well—I needn’t tell you. But Ford—Ford’s rotten all through. Decadent. Don’t you understand why Ford’s hated you all along? It’s the hatred of the sick for the whole, of the neurotic for the sane.
“Whatever they thought you, Rose, however short you fell of their little, inherited standards, you were alive, all the time, and they knew it. And the Aviolets, they’re dead. Dead limbs on a diseased tree. Ford, poor devil, has the Spanish woman’s brain, such as it is, and so he understands—he can see the difference between you and them. The vital spark. You’ve got it, and they haven’t. They’ll never have it any more. That girl that Ford married is healthy enough, a normal woman, if she is a bit of a fool. But he hasn’t been able to give her a child.”
“She may thank God for it, then,” Rose interposed swiftly, “if it’s as bad as you say.”