They all three stopped dead.
‘You, Stephen?’ said Catherine after a moment, very faintly. ‘Why, how——?’
‘I have,’ said Stephen, ‘been waiting all night. Waiting and watching for you.’
‘I—we—broke down.’
He made a sign to the lift boy that he was coming down with him.
‘Enough—enough,’ he said, with a queer gesture of pushing her and everything connected with her out of his sight; and hurried into the lift and disappeared.
Catherine and Christopher looked at each other.
XXII
That was an awful day for Stephen.
Men have found out, with terrible pangs, that their wives, whom they regarded as models of blamelessness, were secretly betraying their homes and families, but Stephen could not recall any instance of a man’s finding this out about his wife’s mother. It was not, he supposed, quite so personally awful as if it were one’s wife, but on the other hand it had a peculiar awfulness of its own. A young woman might descend declivities, impelled by the sheer momentum of youth; but for women of riper years, for the matrons, for the dowagers, for those whose calm remaining business in life is to hold aloft the lantern of example, whose pride it should be to be quiet, to be immobile, to be looked-up to and venerated,—for these to indulge in conduct that disgraced their families and ruined themselves was, in a way, even more horrible. In any woman of riper years it was horrible and terrible. In this one,—what it was in this one was hardly to be uttered, for she—ah, ten times horrible and terrible—was his own mother-in-law.