"The truth is that I can't stand it any longer," she said in a low voice. "I simply can't stand it."
He waited patiently this time for her to continue. He saw that she had something to say which she found difficult to put into words. The pose of her upright figure suggested a certain tensity of motion and when after another silent interval she turned and faced him, her hands were clenched.
"And I'm haunted by the fear that I may be wrong after all," she said, looking at him as if for help. "And you are the last person in the world, I suppose, who can tell me whether I am wrong or not."
"I don't quite understand yet. Is it about him—Mr Kenyon?" he asked.
She did not deign to answer his question directly. "You're supposed to know something about psychology, aren't you?" she went on. "Well, is it possible for a man to lose all decent, human feeling even for his own family?"
"Lord, yes," Arthur replied. "Speaking generally, of course, misers, for instance. Some of them seem to lose all human feeling."
"He isn't the least a miser," she put in. "He's often extraordinarily generous outside his own family."
"I only instanced that as a well-known type," he said. "But drink or drugs will do the same thing."
"Yes, but in all those cases there is always a definite vice of some sort," she complained. "Something that you can take hold of, understand more or less, as a cause for it all. But he hasn't any vices, unless you can call it a vice to be deliberately cruel to your own children and grandchildren without any apparent reason."
"But is he actually cruel?" Arthur remonstrated. "Doesn't he perhaps really mean it all for their own good. He may be deluded—he almost said as much to me—into thinking that they are weaker and less capable than they actually are; but that would be a natural delusion enough in a man of his age."