She walked forward at a furious pace; he plunged after her.
“That’s all right,” he said, “when you’ve done cursing you’ll be cooler. I know I’m an ass, but Aunt Aggie irritated me and got it all out of me. Aunt Aggie’s the devil!”
“Of course she is, and of course you’ll choose her out of everyone, when she hates Philip and would wring his neck to-morrow if her hands were strong enough.”
“Well, I hate him too,” said Henry.
“Oh, no you don’t,” answered Millie, “you think you do. You’re proud of thinking you hate him, and you lose your temper because he laughs at you, and then you throw books at his head, but you don’t really hate him.”
“How do you know I throw books at his head?”
“Oh, you don’t suppose we, any of us, believed that story about you and Philip having a kind of game in the drawing-room just for fun.... Father was furious about it, and said the mirror was unreplaceable, and the sooner you went to Cambridge and stopped there the better—and I think so too. Oh! you’ve just spoilt everything!”
“It’s only about Katie I’m thinking,” he answered doggedly. “It may, after all, be true what Aunt Aggie said, that it will be much better for her in the end for the thing to be broken off, even though it hurts her now.”
“Better for her!” cried Millie scornfully. “Don’t you know that, however deeply she loved Philip when it all began, it’s nothing to the way that she loves him now?... Of course now there’ll be a scene. Philip will be turned off for ever and—” She broke off, then said, staring at Henry: “Supposing, after all, Katie were to go with him!”
Henry shook his head. “She’d never do that, however much Philip is to her. Why, it would mean giving up Garth and us for ever! Mother would never forgive her! After all, she’s only known Philip six months, and I heard her say the other day in London she loves Garth more than ever. And even if Mother did forgive her, in the end she’d never be able to come back here as one of us again. You and I will love her whatever she does, but Mother and Father and the aunts ... I believe it would simply kill them—”