But he faced Ellen bravely and cried: "Yes, you've killed my mummie! She saw there was something wrong going on between you two. She found out what you'd been doing up there in the bedroom when Poppy and me caught you. It must have been an awful shock to her. It was to me," he said pathetically and with relish. "I could hardly believe it myself till Poppy said, 'Well, what would they be doing together in a bedroom if it wasn't that?' How could you do such filthiness...."
Shame swept over Ellen's body, over Ellen's mind. It was not sexual shame, but shame that they should both be human, she and this. But when she turned her eyes away from him in loathing she came on something far worse in Poppy's florid and skull-like face. It would have been appalling if she had been quite attentive, but she was dreamy, because there was this picture forming in her consciousness which would explain the danger to her.... Round Poppy's eyes and mouth there was playing a thirsty look which she seemed to be trying to suppress, for she was glancing about the room with an expression of prudence as if she were reminding herself that not lightly must she run the risk of being evicted from this comfort. But the thirst triumphed. She gave herself the gratification she had desired, and turned on Ellen eyes on whose dull darkness there floated like oil a glistening look of lewd accusation. It took the form of a wet, twitching smile. But behind it was every sort of beaten, desolate envy: the envy of the happy which is felt by the unhappy: the envy of the woman who has a strong and glorious man which is felt by the woman who cannot disguise from herself that in her arms lies weakness and ignobility: the envy of one to whom love has come as love which is felt by one to whom it has come as a deception and a sentence to squalor. And she could not be pitied. One cannot weep over the dead when they have begun to rot: and she was rotten with resentments. Ellen stared at her in anger and in misery that there should be one so sad and ill-used whom she could not comfort; and perceived why at seeing her she had been reminded of an open space round which stood figures. It was of nothing in art she had been thinking, but of John Square in Edinburgh, where after nightfall women had leaned against the garden railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves and lawns, their faces turned to the line of rich men's houses which mounted into the night like tall, impregnable fortresses. If she had not been preoccupied with the picture rising in her mind she would have felt fear, for the ultimate meaning of those women she had always suspected to be danger....
"Making me think evil of my poor mummie too!" Roger sobbed on. "I thought the reason she didn't come to my meeting this evening was that she was ashamed to see her son professing Jesus. I thought hardly of her for not bringing you two along as she promised, because I didn't see you weren't there, and I preached on the sin of impurity specially for you, and it was a real sacrifice for me to do it, because the officers thought it was a forward subject for me to choose, and it my first service here. I had to wrestle to forgive her for it."
It was growing clearer in Ellen's mind, this picture which would tell her why she must not allow Richard to abandon himself to his grief, to his passion.
"But, of course, I see it all now. Oh, my darling, darling mummie! I suppose you two wouldn't come to my meeting because you wanted to stay here and play your tricks, and she saw through you and wouldn't leave you alone in the house. To think I blamed my mummie!"
Now she saw the picture. It was her own mother, her own old mother, shuffling about the kitchen in Hume Park Square in the dirty light of the unwarmed morning; poking forward into the grate with hands on which housework had acted like a skin disease; pulling her flannel dressing-gown about a body which poverty and neglect had made as ugly as the time, the place, the task. She was too tired to see it vividly, but she understood the message. That was what happened to women who allowed themselves to be disregarded; who allowed any other than themselves to dwell in their men's attention.
"Richard! Richard!" She beat on his shoulder to make him listen. "Hark what your brother's saying of us!"
He stirred. He sat up.
"He says we're bad."
He turned round and looked down on Roger. At the sight of his face, though it was still, Ellen wished she had not roused him.