At Chickover there had been the most painful consultations between Stephen and Mrs. Colquhoun as to the best thing to do under the deplorable circumstances. Should they or should they not tell Virginia? Could they, indeed, help telling her? Not all, of course; she must never be told all. The night spent somewhere between Chickover and London—they both felt that the entire stretch of country between those two points was from henceforth polluted—the night that made the scandalous marriage a necessity, must be kept from Virginia for ever. But it became clear after a week that she must be told something, if only to account for her not hearing from her mother.
Stephen couldn’t bring himself to let her have the letters. They came at first, as he had expected, one after the other and all very thick. He wondered, turning them over in his hand, whether it wasn’t his duty to open them, but he resisted the strong leaning towards his duty that lifelong practice in doing it had induced in him, and took the more dignified course of sending them back unopened. Much more punitive too, he felt,—leaving the wretched woman completely in the dark as to what was happening at Chickover and what Virginia was feeling.
Then, when the letters at last left off coming, he watched for telegrams; he rather expected telegrams.
None came.
Then he was on the look-out for an unannounced arrival; he quite thought there would be one.
Nothing happened. Just silence.
At the end of the week Virginia said, ‘I can’t think why mother doesn’t write’—and began to look worried, and write letters herself.
Stephen took them out of the box in the hall and burnt them. ‘Painful, painful necessities,’ he said to Mrs. Colquhoun; for this letter business went against the grain—the gentleman grain, he told his mother, who hardly left him, comforting and advising him as best she could.
At the end of another week Virginia sent a telegram, or rather was going to send it but was stopped by Stephen. Clearly she must be told something. She had said, while writing it: ‘If I don’t get an answer to this I shall go up to London myself and see if anything is wrong.’
‘Poor child, poor child,’ murmured Mrs. Colquhoun, the moment for enlightenment having manifestly come. ‘Would you like me to be with you?’ she whispered in Stephen’s ear.