CHAPTER X—DOROTHY’S MOMENT
WHEN Edward came home on the day of his introduction to the factory, Dorothy met him with an anxious, “Well, Edward?” and, “Oh, Mother,” he had said, “I have to think of this. Pray do not ask me now.”
That was all and, if she liked, she could consider herself snubbed for attempting an unwomanly inquisitiveness into the affairs of men, but he intended no snub nor did she interpret him as side-tracking her. It was, simply, that he refused to involve Dorothy in this trouble.
He might be forced to take some desperate measure—nothing more hopeful than his first thought of enlistment had yet occurred to him—and if things were to come to an ugly pass like that he wasn’t going to have his mother concerned in them. He declined the factory, and discussion would not help.
Reuben felt no surprise at Edward’s silence. The boy was, no doubt, considering his situation and would come in time to the right conclusions about it; he would see that this was not a thing to be settled now, but one which had been settled twenty years ago by the fact that Edward was Reuben’s firstborn son. No: he was not anxious about Edward, with his jejune opinions, his young effervescence, his failure, from the polities of Oxford, to perceive that life was earnest. Edward wanted, did he, to play at being a lawyer: so had Reuben once played at being a Jacobite. Youth had its green sickness. But Dorothy was different: he couldn’t disembarrass himself so easily about Dorothy.
They were all putting a barrier between their thoughts and their words, but marriage had not blunted, it had increased, his sensitiveness to Dorothy’s moods, and he was aware that she was troubled now more deeply than he had ever known her moved before. She seemed to him to be badly missing the just perspective, to be making a mountain of a mole-hill, to be making tragedy out of the commonplace comedy of ingenuous youth, to be too much the mother and too little the wife, to be, by unique exception, unreasonable: but all this counted for nothing with him when Dorothy was pained. Yet he couldn’t, in justice, blame Edward as first cause of her grief when the cause was not Edward, or Edward’s youth, but the universal malady of youth. He reminded himself again of that fantastic folly of his own youth, Jacobitism, and it was notably forebearing in him to remember it now and to decide that his own green sickness had been less excusable than Edward’s.
What it came to was that some one must clear the air, some one must break this painful silence they were, by common consent, keeping about the subject uppermost in their minds. In a few days now Edward would return to Oxford for his last term and it must be understood, explicitly, that when he came home it was to begin his apprenticeship at the factory. Get this thing finally settled, get it definitely stated in terms on both sides, and Dorothy would cease to make a grief of it. It was the inconclusiveness, he thought, which perturbed her.
Edward had a Greek text on his knee when Reuben went into the drawing-room: he might or he might not have been reading it. He might have been conscious that Dorothy had suddenly got up and thrown the curtains back from the window and had opened it and stood there now as if she needed air. Reuben had the tact to make no comment.
He sat down. Then he said, “Edward, I have been thinking of the time when I was your age and it came into my mind that had I then been shown a factory such as I showed you the other week, I should have thought it a very atrocious sight. I couldn’t, of course, actually have been shown such a place when I was your age, for there were no such places. Steam was in its infancy. But I put the matter as I do to show you that I understand the feelings you did not trouble to conceal.”