She murmured wearily. And Francey bent her head to listen. Robert loved her for the tenderness of that gesture. Yet it was bitter, too, that they should talk of his father. He wanted to go up to them and tell the truth brutally to Christine's face. He would have liked to have told them the one dream which he carried over from his sleep. But it would have been useless. Christine would only smile with a cruel, loving wisdom.
"You don't understand. You were only a child. Your father was so unhappy——"
The myth had become an invulnerable reality and had grown golden in the twilight of her coming blindness. James Stonehouse had been a good man, a faithful friend, and broken-hearted husband. If those two had lived everything would have been different. She threw her hallowed picture of them on the screen of the dripping dusk so that they seemed to live. Robert saw them too. That was his mother walking at Christine's side, and then his father—— In a sort of shattering vision Robert saw him, a man of promise, black-browed with the riddle of his failure, a man of many hungers, seduced by rootless passions, lured to miserable shipwreck because he could not keep to any course, because he could not give up worthlessness for worth.
Himself——
He staggered before the brief hallucination. The moisture broke out on his white face. It wasn't enough to hate his father. He had to be fought down day by day. He was always there, waiting to pounce out. He lay on his face, pretending to be dead——
It was gone. He shook himself free as from the touch of an evil, insinuating hand out of the dark. This love was his strength. If Francey were like his mother, then she was also good. It was these rag and bobtail friends that poisoned everything. They would have to be shaken off. Francey was a child, fond of gaiety and pleasure, with no one to guide her. She didn't understand.
Howard and Gertie Sumners were walking behind him now with the luncheon-basket between them, talking earnestly in muffled whispers that were too intimate, and behind them again came the Gang itself, laughing, jostling one another, exchanging facetiousness in their medical-Chelsea jargon.
His father would have liked them. Connie Edwards, no doubt, would have been one of those dazzling, noisy phenomena that burst periodically on the Stonehouse horizon.
Supposing he should come to like them too—to tolerate their ways, their loose living, loose thinking——?
He remembered how that very afternoon he had tried to be one of them, and sickened before himself.