“Miss Honeychurch, dear, we are so sorry! George is so sorry! He thought he had a right to try. I cannot blame my boy, and yet I wish he had told me first. He ought not to have tried. I knew nothing about it at all.”
If only she could remember how to behave!
He held up his hand. “But you must not scold him.”
Lucy turned her back, and began to look at Mr. Beebe’s books.
“I taught him,” he quavered, “to trust in love. I said: ‘When love comes, that is reality.’ I said: ‘Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.’” He sighed: “True, everlastingly true, though my day is over, and though there is the result. Poor boy! He is so sorry! He said he knew it was madness when you brought your cousin in; that whatever you felt you did not mean. Yet”—his voice gathered strength: he spoke out to make certain—“Miss Honeychurch, do you remember Italy?”
Lucy selected a book—a volume of Old Testament commentaries. Holding it up to her eyes, she said: “I have no wish to discuss Italy or any subject connected with your son.”
“But you do remember it?”
“He has misbehaved himself from the first.”
“I only was told that he loved you last Sunday. I never could judge behaviour. I—I—suppose he has.”
Feeling a little steadier, she put the book back and turned round to him. His face was drooping and swollen, but his eyes, though they were sunken deep, gleamed with a child’s courage.