“They’ll find out. They’ll know.”
“Not yet.”
“Sooner or later.”
“Possibly—bit by bit.... But it was hopelessly hard to put. I said I knew he disliked and distrusted you and your work—that you shared all Russell’s opinions: he hates Russell beyond measure—and that we couldn’t possibly face a conventional marriage. What else could one say? I left him to suppose—a registry perhaps....”
Capes let his oar smack on the water.
“Do you mind very much?”
He shook his head.
“But it makes me feel inhuman,” he added.
“And me....”
“It’s the perpetual trouble,” he said, “of parent and child. They can’t help seeing things in the way they do. Nor can we. WE don’t think they’re right, but they don’t think we are. A deadlock. In a very definite sense we are in the wrong—hopelessly in the wrong. But—It’s just this: who was to be hurt?”