Katherine’s cheeks flushed. “That’s unkind, Mother!” she cried. Her voice grew harder. “Please don’t say anything about Philip unless you must. It makes everything very difficult. I know that you don’t like him. You see him strangely, you put him in the wrong whatever he does. But, Mother,” her voice softened again. “It isn’t that. We can’t alter that. Phil will never be at his best at Garth—not as things are now. But if we were married. Oh! you would see how fine things would be!” Her voice was eager, excited now. “He would be happy and quite, quite different with everyone. I know him. He depends so much—too much—on what people think of him. He knows that you don’t like him, and that makes him embarrassed and cross—at his worst. But he’s splendid, really, he is, indeed, and you’d see it if we were married and this horrid engagement were over. He’s fine in every way, but he’s different from us—he’s seen so much more, knows life that we can’t know, has other standards and judgments. Everyone can’t be like us, Mother. There must be people who want different things and think different things. Why should he be made into something like us, forced to think as we do?... Mother, let us be married soon, at once, perhaps, and then everything will be right—” She stopped, breathless then, in her eagerness, bent down and kissed her mother’s cheek.
But Mrs. Trenchard’s cheek was very cold.
“Your father said a year,” she answered, counting her stitches, “four, five, six—Yes, a year. And you agreed to that, you know.”
Katherine turned, with a sharp movement, away, clenching her hands. At that moment she hated her mother, hated with a hot, fiery impulse that urged her to leave the room, the house, the family at that very instant, flinging out, banging the door, and so settle the whole affair for ever.
Mrs. Trenchard made no sound. Her needles clicked. Then she said, as though she had been looking things over:
“Do you think it’s good of you, Katherine, considering how much all these years we’ve all been to one another, to persist in marrying a man whom, after really doing our best, we all of us—yes, all of us—dislike? You’re of age, my dear—you can do as you please. It was your father who consented to this engagement, I was not asked. And now, after all these months, it is hardly a success, is it? You are losing us all—and I believe we still mean something to you. And Philip. How can you know about him, my dear? You are in love now, but that—that first illusion goes very quickly after marriage. And then—when it has gone—do you think that he will be a good companion for you, so different from us all, with such strange ideas picked up in foreign countries? You don’t know what he may have done before he met you.... I don’t appeal to your love for us, as once I might have done, but to your common-sense—your common-sense. Is it worth while to lose us, whom you know, in exchange for a man of whom you can know nothing at all?... Just give me those scissors off the dressing-table. The little ones, dear.”
Katherine turned at the dressing-table. “But,” she cried, her voice full of passionate entreaty, “why must I give you up because I marry him? Why can’t I have you—all of you—and him as well? Why must I choose?” Then she added defiantly: “Millie doesn’t dislike him—nor Aunt Betty.”
“Millie’s very young,” answered her mother. “Thank you, my dear, and as you are there, just that thimble. Thank you ... and your Aunt Betty likes everyone.”
“And then,” Katherine went on, “why do you see it from everyone’s point of view except mine? It’s my life, my future. You’re settled—all of you, you, father, Aunt Aggie, Aunt Betty—but with Millie and Henry and I everything’s to come. And yet you expect us to do all the things, think all the things that you’ve done and thought. We’re different, we’re another generation. If we weren’t behind everyone else there wouldn’t be anything to talk about at all. All parents now,” Katherine ended, with an air of profound knowledge, “think of their children. Life isn’t what it was fifty years ago.”
Mrs. Trenchard smiled a grim little smile. “These are the things, my dear, I suppose, that Philip’s been telling you. You must remember that he’s been living for years in a country where one can apparently do anything one pleases without being thought wicked, and where you’re put in prison a great deal, but only for rather innocent crimes. I don’t pretend to understand all that. We may be—perhaps we are—an old-fashioned family, but the fact remains that we were all happy enough a year ago.”