‘You dare,’ said Stephen, ‘to mention love? You dare to use that word in connection with this boy and yourself?’
‘But would you have me marry him and not love him?’
‘It is shameful,’ said Stephen, beside himself at what seemed to him her ghastly effrontery, ‘that some one so much older should even think of love in connection with some one so much younger.’
‘But what, then,’ said Catherine, ‘about you and Virginia?’
It was the first time she had ever alluded to it. The instant she had said it she was sorry. Always she had rather be hurt than hurt, rather be insulted than insult.
He looked at her a moment, his thin face white with this last outrage. Then he turned, and went away without a word.
XXIII
She spent the afternoon walking up and down the drawing-room, even as Stephen had spent the night walking up and down it.
She was trying to arrange her thoughts, so that she could see a little more clearly through the tangle they were in, but as they were not so much thoughts as feelings, and all of them agitated and all of them contradictory, it was difficult.
What had happened to her was from every point of view most unpleasant. Sometimes she cried, and sometimes she stopped dead in the middle of the room, smitten by a horrid sensation of sickness when she thought of Virginia. Stephen would be as good as his word, she knew, and cut her off from Virginia, and how could he cut her off from Virginia without explaining the reason for it, his reason for it? The alternative was to marry Christopher. But what would Virginia think of that? And if she did marry him—how incredible that she should find herself being forced by Stephen, of all people, even to consider it—it would prove to Stephen that he had been right, and that she had been guilty.