Katherine got up from her knees. “You won’t think that when you know him better. It’s only that he’s seen more of the world than we have. He’ll change and we’ll change, and perhaps it will be better for all of us. Down in Glebeshire we always have done so much the same things and seen the same people, and even here in London—”
Her mother gave a little cry, not sharp for anyone else in the world, but very sharp indeed for Mrs. Trenchard.
“You! Katherine—you! If it had been Millie!”
They looked at one another then in silence. They were both of them conscious of an intensity of love that they had borne towards one another through the space of a great many years—a love that nothing else had ever approached. But it was an emotion that had always been expressed in the quietest terms. Both to Katherine and her mother demonstrations were unknown. Katherine felt now, at what promised to be, perhaps, the sharpest crisis that her life had yet experienced, an urgent desire to break through, to fling her arms round her mother, to beat down all barriers, to assure her that whatever emotion might come to her, nothing could touch their own perfect relationship. But the habits of years muffled everything in thick, thick wrappings—it was impossible to break through.
“Your father is pleased?” said Mrs. Trenchard.
“Yes,” answered Katherine. “He likes Philip. But we must wait a year.”
“Your father has never told me anything. Never.” She got up slowly from the sofa.
“He couldn’t have told you,” Katherine said eagerly. “He has only just known. I came straight to you from him.”
Mrs. Trenchard now stood, looking rather lost, in the middle of her room; the shawl had slipped half from her shoulders, and she seemed, suddenly, an old woman.
The vision of something helpless in her, as she stood there, stirred Katherine passionately.