“You are very young, Philip,” she said. “You want life to be perfect. It can’t be that. You must adapt yourself. I think that you will both be happier here in Glebeshire—near us.”
He would have broken out, crying that Katherine was his, not theirs, that he wanted her for himself, that they must be free.... Of what use? That impassivity took his courage and flattened it all out as though he were a child of ten, still ruled by his mother.
“Shall we go in?” said Mrs. Trenchard. “It’s a little cold.”
It was after this conversation that he began to place his hope upon the day when his Moscow misdeeds would be declared—that seemed now his only road to freedom.
Upon one lovely summer evening they sat there and had, some of them, the same thought.
Millie, slim and white, standing before the long open window, stared into the purple night, splashed with stars and mysterious with tier-like clouds. She was thinking of Anna, of all that life that Philip had, of what a world it must be where there are no laws, no conventions, no restraints. That woman now had some other lover, she thought no more, perhaps, of Philip—and no one held her the worse. She could do what she would—how full her life must be, how adventurous, packed with colour, excitement, battle and victory. And, after all, it might be, to that woman, that this adventure meant so little that she did not realise it as an adventure. Millie’s heart rose and fell; her heart hurt her so that she pressed her hand against her frock. She wanted her own life to begin—at once, at once. Other girls had found the beginning of it during those days in Paris, but some English restraint and pride—she was intensely proud—had held her back. But now she was on fire with impatience, with longing, with, courage.... As she stared into the night she seemed to see the whole world open, like a shining silver plate, held by some dark figure for her acceptance. She stretched out her hands.
“Take care you don’t catch cold by that open window, Millie dear,” said her mother.
Henry also was thinking of Anna. From where he sat he could, behind his book, raising his eyes a little, see Philip. Philip was sitting, very straight and solid, with his short thick legs crossed in front of him, reading a book. He never moved. He made no sound. Henry had, since the day when he had broken the mirror, avoided Philip entirely. He did not want to consider the man at all; of course he hated the man because it was he who had made them all miserable, and yet, had the fellow never loved Katherine, had he remained outside the family, Henry knew now that he could have loved him.
This discovery he had made exactly at the moment when that book had fallen crashing into the mirror—it had been so silly, so humiliating a discovery that he had banished it from his mind, had refused to look into it at all.