‘Motor-cycles?’ said Virginia, her mouth open.
‘I naturally hadn’t the remotest idea it could be your mother, but mother—our mother—met me and told me—yes, yes, Kate, I know—I’m coming immediately. Good-bye, my love—I shall miss my train——’
‘But Stephen——’
‘Mother will tell you. Really I find the utmost difficulty in believing it. And not back yet. Still scorching——’
He was out in the hall; he was in the car; he was gone.
Virginia stood staring after him. Stephen gone, and in such a way. No good-bye hardly, no lingering, sweet farewell, nothing but hurry and upset. What had happened? What had her mother done?
His incredible last word beat on her ears—scorching. She wished she had flung herself into the car and gone with him to the station, and so at least had a little more time to be told things. But Stephen disliked impetuosity, and, for that matter, so did she. There were, however, moments in life when indulgence in it was positively right.
Virginia stood there feeling perhaps more unhappy than she had ever yet felt. One couldn’t have a mother all one’s life and not be attached to her; at least, she couldn’t. She was made up of loyalties. They differed in intensity, but each in its degree was complete. Passionately she wanted the objects of her loyalties to have the invulnerableness of perfection. Stephen had it. She had supposed, till this last visit, that her mother had it—in an entirely different line, of course, with all sorts of little things about her Virginia didn’t understand but was willing to accept as also, in their way, in their different way, good. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, Virginia, observing her mother, had sometimes quoted to herself. Both of them glories, but different,—greater and lesser. Stephen had the glory of the sun; her mother had the moon one. During this unlucky visit, though, how had it not, thought Virginia standing on the steps, looking down the empty avenue, been obscured. And now, just at the end, just as she was going to make such an effort to set everything right again, her mother had evidently done something definitely dreadful, with a motor-cycle. Her mother, her mouse-like mother. What could she possibly....
She turned away and went indoors, her eyes fixed on the carpet, her brows knitted in painfullest perplexity.
Should she go and meet Stephen’s mother, who was coming to lunch and evidently knew what had happened? There was still half an hour before lunch, and before Stephen’s mother, who never came a minute sooner or a minute later than the exact appointed time, would arrive. But her own mother might come back at any moment, and it would be better to hear things from her, wouldn’t it, than from Stephen’s mother. She was very fond of Stephen’s mother,—indeed, how should she not be, when he was?—and admired her many qualities excessively, but she didn’t love her as she did her own mother. One began so young with one’s own mother, of course one felt differently about her from what one did about any one else’s. She shrank from hearing, from Stephen’s mother, whatever it was her own mother had done.