"If you care so much, why don't you choose a better mother for your own children?"
It was as if she said: "If you care so much about Veronica, why don't you marry her?"
"It's a bit too late to think of that now," said poor Nicky.
Because he had cared so much about Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.
"I couldn't do anything with him," Vera said afterwards. "Nothing I said made the least impression on him."
That however (as both Vera and Nicky were aware), was not strictly true. But, in spite of Nicky's terrible capacity for remembering, she stuck to it that Desmond's affair would have made no impression on him if it had not been for that other absurd affair of the Professor's wife. And it would have been better, Lawrence Stephen said, for Nicky to have made love to all the married women in Cambridge than for him to marry Phyllis Desmond.
These reflections were forced on them by the ironic coincidence of Nicky's engagement with his rehabilitation at the University.
Drayton's forecast was correct; Nicky's brother Michael had not been removed from Nicky's College eight months before letters of apology and restitution came. But both apology and restitution came too late.
For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.