“We weren’t considering your feelings so much as your good,” said Aunt Laura complacently.
“Father . . . father . . . you can’t mean it. You see. . . . I don’t know . . . it would all be so strange. So awfully difficult. I should have lost touch with all the work the form was doing. I shouldn’t be able to pick it up. It’s rotten . . . rotten . . .”
“Edwin, you will distress your father . . .”
“Oh, Aunt Laura, do let father speak for himself.”
Immense volumes of yellow smoke signalled Uncle Albert’s distress.
“Father . . .”
“It’s difficult, Edwin . . .”
“But it isn’t difficult, father, dear. Aunt Laura doesn’t realise. She doesn’t realise what it would be like going back like that to St. Luke’s. It would only be waste of time. Father, I’d read during the hols. . . . I would, really. It isn’t that I want to get out of going back to work. It isn’t that a bit. I’d work like blazes. Only . . . only everything now seems to have gone funny and empty . . . sort of blank. I . . . I feel awful without mother . . .”
“Edwin . . .” warningly, from Aunt Laura.
That Aunt Laura should presume to correct him in a matter of delicacy! “Of course you don’t understand,” he said bitterly. “You don’t want me to speak about mother. You’ve had your excitement out of it. You’ve had your chance of bossing round, and now you want to arrange what I shall do for the rest of my life, I suppose. You’ve no . . . no reverence.”