When they got there Christopher insisted on his going up and having a drink. Lewes did his best not to, for he had no wish to behold his friend’s married milieu; but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went.
He felt a faint distaste at seeing his friend opening a door, his only by marriage, with a latch-key belonging really to a woman, but suppressed this as foolish. Fortunately the flat was not the thing of fal-lals he had imagined, and he was quite relieved on being taken into the drawing-room to find it so solid and so sombre.
‘George,’ explained Christopher, seeing his friend looking round.
‘George?’ repeated Lewes, who had never heard of him.
‘All this black stuff.’
‘Catherine’s first husband,’ said Christopher. ‘He was old enough to be her father too.’
‘Was he?’ said Lewes, groping about among these different persons old enough to be people’s fathers.
He sank into a chair. He drank whisky. At intervals he tried to go, but Christopher wouldn’t let him. For two hours he had to listen to talk that made him feel dimmer and dimmer of mind, more and more as if his roots were wilting; for Christopher was jerked back by Catherine’s unexpected failure to come home, and his unhappiness at the prospect of the first night alone in their room, and his efforts not to be anxious and worried, into thinking and talking only of her.
‘My dear chap—yes ...,’ ‘Old man, I’m sure of it ...,’ Lewes, as sympathetically as he could, from time to time interjected. But his head drooped; his spirit failed him. Women. What didn’t they do to a sensible, intelligent man? Made him go all slushy and rotten; turned him into nothing better than a jabbering ass. Much of it was whisky, Lewes allowed, as Christopher drowned his disappointment and secret fear in more and more of the stuff, but most of it was woman.