She had never before thought of parentage with any enthusiasm. She had viewed it rather in the spirit of Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw, and conceived of parents generally in relation to their children as embarrassed hypocrites with an instinctive disposition towards restraint and suppression. She had made an exception of her own particular pair; Daddy had been a great friend anyhow, though mother for the most part had been a concentrated incarnate “Don’t.” But she had never realized there might be something rather intimately interesting in consanguinity. And then suddenly a door had opened, a man had come in and sat down and talked to her and discovered himself the nearest thing in life to her. And she to him. She wanted to go to him again; she wanted to see more of him, be with him. But he made no sign and she could think of no decent excuse for a call upon him. The very intensity of her desire made her unable to go to him easily. She wrote the various letters they had agreed she should write, and then decided to master mental science and lunacy generally. That and the case of her “Daddy” she perceived to be her formal link with Devizes.
She set out for the Reading Room of the British Museum, for which she had a students’ ticket, and she tried to concentrate her mind upon the book she had requisitioned, instead of letting it wander off into the strangest reveries about this miraculously discovered blood relation. In the afternoon she rang up Lambone to be given tea, with the intention of learning everything that the wise man could tell her about Devizes and generally turning him over conversationally. But Lambone was out. The next day the craving for Devizes was overpowering. She rang him up.
“May I have some tea?” she asked. “I’ve got nothing much to say, but I want to see you.”
“Delighted,” said Devizes.
When she got to him she found herself shy, and him as shy as herself. For a little while they made polite conversation; it might almost have been the conversation of two people at a formal call in a country town. He called her “Christina Alberta,” but she called him “Doctor Devizes,” and he asked her if she played or danced, and whether she had ever been abroad. She sat in an arm-chair and he stood over her on the hearthrug. It was clear that the only way to intimacy lay in a frank treatment of her Daddy. She felt that if this sort of talk went on for another minute she would have to scream or throw her tea-cup in the fire. So she plunged.
“When did you first know my mother?”
Devizes’ attitude stiffened, and he smiled faintly at her boldness. “I was a Cambridge undergraduate reading for the Natural Science Tripos, and I went down to Sheringham to read. We—we picked each other up on the beach. We made love—in a scared, furtive, desperate, ignorant sort of way. People were primitive in those days—compared with what they are now.”
“Daddy wasn’t there.”
“He came in afterwards.”
Devizes considered for a moment. He decided that it wasn’t fair to oblige her to go on questioning him. “My father,” he said, “was a pretty considerable old bully. He was Sir George Devizes, the man who invented the Devizes biscuit and cured old Alphonso, and he was celebrated for being rude to his patients. He would smack their stomachs and tell them they ought to be scooped out. He helped make Unter Magenbad. He suspected me of being a bit of a soft, though as a matter of fact I wasn’t, and he generally had the effect of laying up for a quarrel with me. He kept me pretty short. He wasn’t particularly nice to my mother. He used to get at my mother through me. I didn’t dare to have a scrape of any sort. I was really afraid of him. If I saw a scrape blowing up my habit and disposition was to run away.”