He turned round as she came in.
"Well, Mary," he said. "I've been having a very unpleasant discussion with Terry. It ended where it began. He would not listen to me."
She came and stood behind his chair. The fire was low in the grate. There was the intolerable smell of a smoking lamp in the room. The reading-lamp on the table was flaring. She turned it down and replenished the fire. The discomfort of it all—the room felt cold and dismal—depressed her further.
"The poor boy!" she said. "What are we to do, Shawn? You can't expect him to give up Stella without any explanation. He would be a poor creature if he could—not your son or mine. Shawn, you will have to tell him. How could you leave it to me?"
"And if I do, what then?"
She shook her head. She did not know what then: or rather she did not wish to answer the question.
She was sitting on the arm of his chair. He leant his head against her wearily. In the glass above the chimney-piece, tilted towards them, she saw his face and was frightened. Were the purple shadows really there, or did she only imagine them?
"If such a story had been told to me about you, Mary," he asked, "do you suppose it would have made any difference? I would have said like an ancestor of mine:
"Has the pearl less whiteness
Because of its birth?
Has the violet less brightness
For growing near earth?
That is what any lover worth his salt would say: yet when one is older and very proud of one's family the bar sinister is not a thing to be thought of."