She stared at him in astonishment and dismay. Virginia as a cure had failed. It was at once excessively warming to her vanity and curiously humiliating to her sense of decency. The last twelve years of her life, since George’s death, as the widowed mother of a daughter who during them grew up, was taken out, became engaged and married, had so much accustomed her to her position as a background,—necessary, even important, but only a background for the young creature who was to have all the money directly she married with her mother’s consent or came of age,—that to be dragged out of this useful obscurity, so proper, as she had long considered, to her age, and her friends and relations had considered it so also, to be dragged out with real violence into the very front of the stage, forced to be the prima donna of the piece of whom it was suddenly passionately demanded that she should sing, shocked and humiliated her. Yet, over and through this feeling of wounded decency washed a queer warm feeling of gratified vanity. She was still, then, if taken by herself, away from Virginia, who up to three months before had always been at her side, attractive; she was still so apparently young, so outwardly young, that Christopher evidently altogether failed to visualise Virginia. It really was a feather in a woman’s cap. But then the recollection that this young man was just the right age for Virginia overwhelmed her, and she turned away with a quick flush of shame.
‘I have my pride,’ she remarked.
‘Pride! What has pride to do with love?’
‘Everything with the only sort of love I shall ever know—family love, and the affection of my child, and later on I hope of her children.’
‘Oh Catherine, don’t talk such stuff to me—such copy-book, renunciated stuff!’ he exclaimed, coming nearer.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘how much older I am than you, whatever you may choose to pretend. Why, we don’t even talk the same language. When I talk what I’m sure is sense you call it copy-book stuff. And when you talk what I know is nonsense, you’re positive it is most right and proper.’
‘So it is, because it’s natural. Yours is all convention and other people’s ideas, and what you’ve been told and not what you’ve thought for yourself, and nothing to do with a simple following of your natural instincts.’
‘My natural instincts!’
She was horrified at his supposing she had such things. At her age. The mother of Virginia.
‘Well, are you going to dare tell me you haven’t been happy with me, you haven’t liked going out with me?’