XXXI
Now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. As she faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. She had had foreknowledge of it from the moment when Jane Holland came first into Brodrick's house.
She maintained her policy of silence. It helped her, as if she felt that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease to be.
She would have been glad if Brodrick's family could have remained unaware of the situation. But Brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it.
Every Brodrick, once he had passed the privileged years of his minority, knew that grave things were expected of him. It was expected of him, first of all, that he should marry; and that, not with the levity of infatuation, but soberly and seriously, for the good and for the preservation of the race of Brodricks in its perfection. As it happened, in the present generation of Brodricks, not one of them had done what was expected of them, except Sophy. John had fallen in love with a fragile, distinguished lady, and had incontinently married her; and she had borne him no children. Henry, who should have known better, had fallen in love with a lady so excessively fragile that she had died before he could marry her at all. And because of his love for her he had remained unmarried. Frances had set her heart on a rascal who had left her for the governess. And now Hugh, with his Jane Holland, bid fair to be similarly perverse.
For every Brodrick took, not delight, so much as a serious and sober satisfaction, in the thought that he disappointed expectation. Each one believed himself the creature of a solitary and majestic law. His actions defied prediction. He felt it as an impertinence that anybody, even a Brodrick, should presume to conjecture how a Brodrick would, in any given circumstances, behave. He held it a special prerogative of Brodricks, this capacity for accomplishing the unforeseen. Nobody was surprised when the unforeseen happened; for this family made it a point of honour never to be surprised. The performances of other people, however astounding, however eccentric, appeared to a Brodrick as the facilely calculable working of a law from which a Brodrick was exempt. Whatever another person did, it was always what some Brodrick had expected him to do. Even when Frances's husband ran away with the governess and broke the heart Frances had set on him, it was only what John and Henry and Sophy and Hugh had known would happen if she married him. If it hadn't happened to a Brodrick, they would hardly have blamed Heron for his iniquity; it was so inherent in him and predestined.
So, when it seemed likely that Hugh would marry Jane Holland, the Brodricks were careful to conceal from each other that they were unprepared for this event. They discussed it casually, and with less emotion than they had given to the wild project of the magazine.
It was on a Sunday evening at the John Brodricks', shortly after Jane had left Putney.
"It strikes me," said John who began it, "that one way or another Hugh is seeing a great deal of Miss Holland."