‘How do you do,’ he said, grabbing at his soft hat with one hand and nervelessly shaking her hand with the other.
‘How very nice of you to come and meet me,’ she said gaily. Funny old Stephen. One couldn’t really be angry with him. And he was really very good. He looked extremely old, though, after having had Christopher before one’s eyes.
‘Not at all,’ said Stephen.
‘How is Virginia?’
‘Well.’
‘I’m so glad. I’m longing to see her. Oh, how do you do, Smithers. How are the children? I’m so glad——’
People were staring at her. It had not yet been his lot to be in the company of a lady people stared at. He hurried her into the car. He tried hard to respect her.
There wasn’t much time between the station and the house for respect, but he did try. He had thought to clear the ground for it by reassuring her during the brief drive as to Virginia’s ignorance of the reasons that had led to her marriage. ‘Led to’ was how he had intended to put it, rejecting the harsher and more exact word necessitated, for he was anxious to be as forgiving and delicate as possible, now that everybody concerned had turned the lamentable page. Besides, who was he to judge? Christ hadn’t judged the other woman taken in adultery.
Delicacy, however, was as difficult as respect. She herself seemed totally without it. Also it was difficult to feel she was his mother-in-law at all. She was curiously altered. He couldn’t make out in what the alteration consisted. Manifestly she was aping youth, but she was aping it, he admitted, so cleverly that if he hadn’t known her he might certainly, at a casual glance, have taken her for a daughter rather than a mother, though not the sort of daughter one would wish to have.
The moment they were seated in the car she herself threw delicacy to the winds. ‘You know, Stephen,’ she said taking his hand—he didn’t know whether to withdraw it or behave as if he hadn’t noticed—‘good does come in the strangest way out of evil.’