Now he knew, quite definitely, after a month of his engagement to Katherine, that some of the members of the Trenchard family did not like him—No amount of his determination to like them could blind him to the truth of this unpleasant fact—Mrs. Trenchard did not like him, Aunt Aggie did not like him, probably Mr. Trenchard, senior, and Great-Aunt Sarah did not like him (he could not tell, because they were so silent), and he was not sure whether Henry liked him or not. Therefore, in front of this alarming array of critics his conscience awoke.
The other force that stirred his conscience was Katherine’s belief in him. In Moscow no one had believed in anyone—anyone there, proved to be faultless, would have been, for that very reason, unpopular. Anna herself had held the most humorous opinion of him. (She liked Englishmen, respected their restraint and silence, but always laughed at their care for appearances.) Although he had known that his love for Katherine had sprung partly from his sense of her difference from Anna, he, nevertheless, had expected the qualities that had pleased him in the one to continue in the other. He discovered that Katherine trusted him utterly, that she believed, with absolute confidence, in every word that fell from his lips, and he knew that, if the old whole world came to her and told her that he had had for several years a mistress in Moscow and he denied it to her, that she would laugh at the world. This knowledge made him extremely uncomfortable. First, he tried to persuade himself that he had never had a mistress, that Anna had never existed, then, when that miserably failed, he told himself that he could always deny it if she asked him, then he knew that he loved her so much that he would not lie to her (this discovery pleased him). He must, he finally knew, tell her himself.... He told himself that he would wait a little until she believed in him less completely; he must prepare her mind. He did not even now, however, consider that she would feel his confession very deeply; Anna would simply have laughed at his scruples.
Meanwhile he loved her so deeply and so completely that Anna’s figure was a ghost, dimly recalled from some other life. He had almost forgotten her appearance. She had a little black mole on her left cheek—or was it her right?...
Somewhere in the beginning of February he decided that he would cultivate Henry, not because he liked Henry, but because he thought that Katherine would like it—also, although this he did not confess to himself, because Henry was so strange and unexpected that he was half afraid of him.
Of course Henry ought to be sent to one of the Universities, it was absurd to keep a great, hulking boy of nineteen hanging about, wasting his own time and the time of his family, suffering no discipline and learning nothing of any value. George Trenchard had told Philip that Henry was too young for Oxford, and was to have a year of “seeing the world” before he “went up”. A fine lot of seeing the world Henry was doing, slouching about the house, reading novels and sulking! Philip, in spite of his years in Russia, felt very strongly that every Englishman should be shaven clean and wear clothes from a good tailor. About men of other nationalities it did not matter, but smartness was expected from an Englishman. Henry, however, was in that unpleasant condition known as “sprouting.” He had a little down on one cheek, apparently none on the other; in certain lights his chin boasted a few hairs of a forlorn and desolate appearance, in other lights you would swear that there were none. His forehead often broke into pimples (these were a terrible agony to him).
“Why can’t he do something with his hair?” thought Philip, “brush it and have it cut regularly. Why is it that awful dusty colour? He might at least do something to his clothes. Mrs. Trenchard ought to see to it.”
Mrs. Trenchard did try to “see to it”. She was perpetually buying new clothes for Henry; she took him to her husband’s tailor and dragged him, again and again, to have things “tried on”. Henry, however, possessed the art of reducing any suit, within twenty-four hours of his first wearing it, to chaos. He was puzzled himself to know what he did.
“But, Henry, it was new last week!”
“I know. How can I help it? I haven’t done anything to the beastly thing. It simply came like that.”
He affected a lofty indifference to clothes, but Philip, who saw him look frequently into the looking-glass, suspected the sincerity of this. Katherine said to Philip: