Reuben rose, with clenched fists. He had not the intention of striking his son, but the impulse was irresistible to dominate the slighter man, to stand menacingly over him. How in this should she find her moment? Where if temper rose, if Reuben did the unforgivable, if he struck Edward, where was her opportunity to make a peace and gain her point? As she had cried “Edward!”, so now, “Reuben!” she cried, and put a hand on his.
He responded instantly to the sound of her voice and the touch of her hand. “You are right, Dorothy,” he said. “We must not flatter our young comedian by taking him gravely.”
“That is an insult, sir,” said Edward.
“In comedy,” Reuben smiled suavely at him, “it may be within the rules for a father to insult a vaporing son. In life, such possibilities do not exist.”
Ridicule! Edward could fight against any weapon but this. “You treat me like a child,” he said in plaintive impotence.
“Oh, no,” said Reuben. “So far, I have given you the benefit of the doubt. I have not whipped you yet.”
“Whipped!”
“A method of correction, Edward, used upon children and sometimes on those whose years outstrip their sense.”
“Do you seriously picture me, sir, remaining here to be a whipping block?”
“Children run away: and children are brought back.” Her moment! Oh, it was slipping from her as they squabbled, Edward’s future was at stake, and not his alone. If young Tom Hepplestall was for the army, there were still her younger sons; there were Edward’s own unborn sons. The stake was not Edward’s future only, it was the future of the Hepplestalls and all her landed instincts were in revolt against the thought that her sons were to follow Reuben in his excursion, his strange variation, from the type she knew. Once his factory had seemed mysterious and romantic. Now, she was facing it, she was seeing it through Edward’s outraged eyes. Incredible mercy that she had not seen it before, but not incredible in the light of her love for Reuben. It had been a thing apart from her life and now, implacably, was come into it. There was no evading the factory now; there was no facile blinking at it as a dark place in Reuben’s life about which she could be incurious, it was claiming her Edward, it had come, through him, into her life now.