Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so.... I think you know exactly what I mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a truthful, unpleasant statement.)
But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her, more savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”
At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would suddenly be what they really were.
She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her because she is different from all the others ... from the sort of girls that you were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them about here ... girls as like as peas in a pod.”
“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her daughter ... this American boy with a French name who has never seen his own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others. Who knows anything about him?”
“Sabine,” began Olivia.
“Sabine!” he interrupted. “Sabine! What does she care who he is or where he comes from? She’s given up decent people long ago, when she went away from here and married that Levantine blackguard of a husband. Sabine!... Sabine would only like to bring trouble to us ... the people to whom she belongs. She hates us.... She can barely speak to me in a civil fashion.”
Olivia smiled quietly and tossed her cigarette into the ashes beneath the cold steel engraving of the Signing. “You are beginning to talk nonsense, Anson. Let’s stick to facts, for once. I’ve met the boy in Paris.... Sybil knew him there. He is intelligent and handsome and treats women as if they were something more than stable-boys. There are still a few of us left who like to be treated thus ... as women ... a few of us even here in Durham. No, I don’t imagine you’ll care for him. He won’t belong to your club or to your college, and he’ll see life in a different way. He won’t have had his opinions all ready made, waiting for him.”
“It’s my children I’m thinking of.... I don’t want them picking up with any one, with the first person who comes along.”
Olivia did not smile. She turned away now and said softly, “If it’s Jack you’re worrying about, you needn’t fuss any longer. He won’t marry Thérèse. I don’t think you know how ill he is.... I don’t think, sometimes, that you really know anything about him at all.”