The words were simple enough; the tone was full of emotion. He was fast losing control of himself. She felt it through every nerve, and a sort of wild dread seized her of what he might say next. Oh, she must, she must prevent it!
'Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was she not?' she said, forcing herself to speak in her most everyday tones.
He controlled himself with a mighty effort.
'Since I became a Fellow. We have been alone in the world so long. We have never been able to do without each other.'
'Isn't it wonderful to you?' said Catherine, after a little electric pause—and her voice was steadier and clearer than it had been since the beginning of their conversation—'how little the majority of sons and daughters regard their parents when they come to grow up and want to live their own lives? The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to throw off their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them—decently, of course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All the long years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.'
He looked at her quickly—a troubled, questioning look.
'It is so, often; but not, I think, where the parents have truly understood their problem. The real difficulty for father and mother is not childhood, but youth; how to get over that difficult time when the child passes into the man or woman, and a relation of governor and governed should become the purest and closest of friendships. You and I have been lucky.'
'Yes,' she said, looking straight before her, and still speaking with a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, 'and so are the greater debtors! There is no excuse, I think, for any child, least of all for the child who has had years of understanding love to look back upon, if it puts its own claim first; if it insists on satisfying itself, when there is age and weakness appealing to it on the other side, when it is still urgently needed to help those older, to shield those younger, than itself. Its business first of all is to pay its debt, whatever the cost.'
The voice was low, but it had the clear vibrating ring of steel. Robert's face had darkened visibly.
'But, surely,' he cried, goaded by a new stinging sense of revolt and pain—'surely the child may make a fatal mistake if it imagines that its own happiness counts for nothing in the parents' eyes. What parent but must suffer from the starving of the child's nature? What have mother and father been working for, after all, but the perfecting of the child's life? Their longing is that it should fulfil itself in all directions. New ties, new affections, on the child's part, mean the enriching of the parent. What a cruel fate for the elder generation, to make it the jailer and burden of the younger!'