Into this strange dark confusion the thought of his mother drove itself. He had from the very beginning been aware of his father in this connection. In his own selfish way he loved his father, and he shared in his pride and self-content. He was proud of his father for being what he was, for his good-natured contempt of other people, for his handsome body and his dominance of the town. He could understand that his father should feel as he did, and he did honestly consider him a magnificent man and far above every one else in the place. But that did not mean that he ever listened to anything that his father said. He pleased himself in what he did, and laughed at his father's temper.
He had perceived from the first that this connection of his with Annie Hogg might do his father very much harm, and he did not want to harm him. The thought of this did not mean that for a moment he contemplated dropping the affair because of his father--no, indeed--but the thought of the old man, as he termed him, added dimly to his general unhappiness. He appreciated the way that his father had taken his return from Oxford. The old man was a sportsman. It was a great pity that he should have to make him unhappy over this business. But there it was--you couldn't alter things.
It was this fatalistic philosophy that finally ruled everything with him. "What must be must." If things went wrong he had his courage, and he was helped too by his contempt for the world....
He knew his father, but he was aware now that he knew nothing at all about his mother.
"What's she thinking about?" he asked himself.
One afternoon he was about to go to Seatown when, in the passage outside his bedroom, he met his mother. They both stopped as though they had something to say to one another. He did not look at all like her son, so fair, tall and aloof, as though even in his own house he must be on his guard, prepared to challenge any one who threatened his private plans.
"She's like a little mouse," he thought to himself, as though he were seeing her for the first time, "preparing to run off into the wainscot" He was conscious, too, of her quiet clothes and shy preoccupied timidity--all of it he seemed to see for the first time, a disguise for some purpose as secret, perhaps, as his own.
"Oh, Falk," she said, and stopped, and then went on with the question that she so often asked him:
"Is there anything you want?"
"No, mother, thank you. I'm just going out."