This epithet stung Henry to madness. Ah, if Aunt Aggie only knew all, she’d see that he was very far from being ‘only a boy’—if she only knew the burden of secret responsibility that he’d been bearing during all these weeks. He’d keep secret no longer—it was time that everyone should know the kind of man to whom Katherine was being sacrificed. He turned round to his aunt, trembling with anger and excitement.
“You talk like that!” he cried, “but you don’t know what I know!”
“What don’t I know?” she asked eagerly.
“About Philip—this man Mark—He’s wicked, he’s awful, he’s—abominable!”
“Well,” said Aunt Aggie, dropping her needles. “What’s he done?”
“Done!” Henry exclaimed, sinking his voice into a horrified and confidential whisper. “He’s been a dreadful man. Before, in Russia, there’s nothing he didn’t do. I know, because there’s a friend of mine who knew him very well out there. He lived a terribly immoral life. He was notorious. He lived with a woman for years who wasn’t his wife, and they had a baby. There’s nothing he didn’t do—and he never told father a word.” Henry paused for breath.
Aunt Aggie’s cheeks flushed crimson, as they always did when anyone spoke, before her, of sexual matters.
At last she said, as though to herself: “I always knew it—I always knew it. You could see it in his face. I warned them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
Henry meanwhile had recovered himself. He stood there looking into the Mirror. It was a tragic moment. He had done, after all, what, all these months, he had determined to prevent himself from doing. He saw now, in a flash of accusing anger, what would most certainly follow. Aunt Aggie would tell everyone. Philip would be dismissed—Katherine’s heart would be broken.
He saw nothing but Katherine, Katherine whom he loved with all the ardour of his strange undisciplined quixotic soul. He saw Katherine turning to him, reproaching him, then, hiding her grief, pursuing her old life, unhappy for ever and ever. (At this stage in his development, he saw everything in terms of ‘for ever and for ever’.) It never occurred to him that if Philip were expelled out of the Trenchard Eden Katherine might accompany him. No, she would remain, a heart-broken monument to Henry’s lack of character.