"Even after June's reassurance?"
"June? June doesn't understand—doesn't understand anything in this business. She couldn't."
"Why not?"
"Because, for one thing, she's only a child, despite her adult ways of managing things. She hasn't the faintest idea of what sort of a man Terry is—oh, it's absurd—too absurd...." She broke off suddenly and added, after a pause: "You'll go to-morrow, of course?"
"Most likely."
She shrugged her shoulders almost contemptuously, and then decided to return to the End House in the car that the chauffeur had driven up. I wasn't altogether sorry; somehow she was just beginning to get on my nerves.... On the pavement, as I saw her into the car, she said, finally: "I'm glad you'll go to-morrow. Then you'll find things out for yourself. June's too young—too unsophisticated. She means well, but she can't know—she can't understand—she must be making terrible blunders about him all the time. It was all right her teaching him tennis—she can do that well enough ... but now...."
The chauffeur had not heard us talking, and drove away in the middle of that sentence. I have often wondered how, if at all, she had been going to finish it.
IV
And the next morning....
It was one of those cool, sunlit days when to leave London for the country is more than a pleasure—it is an intoxication, an orgy. During the journey from Waterloo there seemed but one rift in the whole sky of optimism—and that one rift was Helen. She had been getting on my nerves. I had already learned to dislike her attitude towards Terry and her husband, and now, it seemed, I was beginning to dislike her attitude towards her daughter also.