He looked at her out of his melancholy eyes: ‘Can’t you trust me? Won’t you try to trust me, Anna?’
But Anna shook her head: ‘I don’t understand, why shouldn’t you trust me, Philip?’
And then in his terror for this well-beloved woman, Sir Philip committed the first cowardly action of his life—he who would not have spared himself pain, could not bear to inflict it on Anna. In his infinite pity for Stephen’s mother, he sinned very deeply and gravely against Stephen, by withholding from that mother his own conviction that her child was not as other children.
‘There’s nothing for you to understand,’ he said firmly, ‘but I like you to trust me in all things.’
After this they sat talking about the child, Sir Philip very quiet and reassuring.
‘I’ve wanted her to have a healthy body,’ he explained, ‘that’s why I’ve let her run more or less wild; but perhaps we’d better have a governess now, as you say; a French governess, my dear, if you’d prefer one—Later on I’ve always meant to engage a bluestocking, some woman who’s been to Oxford. I want Stephen to have the finest education that care and money can give her.’
But once again Anna began to protest. ‘What’s the good of it all for a girl?’ she argued. ‘Did you love me any less because I couldn’t do mathematics? Do you love me less now because I count on my fingers?’
He kissed her. ‘That’s different, you’re you,’ he said, smiling, but a look that she knew well had come into his eyes, a cold, resolute expression, which meant that all persuasion was likely to be unavailing.
Presently they went upstairs to the nursery, and Sir Philip shaded the candle with his hand, while they stood together gazing down at Stephen—the child was heavily asleep.
‘Look, Philip,’ whispered Anna, pitiful and shaken, ‘look, Philip—she’s got two big tears on her cheek!’