“I mean to. Yes, I shall go.”
She sat still for a minute, looking down at the pink-and-yellow carpet.
“And what will you do?”
She looked up at him.
“I think I shall take her to the island. I am almost sure I shall. Emile, I don’t believe in cowardice, and I sometimes think I am inclined to be a coward about Vere. She is growing up. She will be seventeen this year, very soon. There are girls who marry at sixteen, even English girls.”
“That is true.”
She could gather nothing from his tone; and now his face was perfectly calm.
“My instinct is to keep Vere just as she is, to preserve the loveliness of childhood in her as long as possible, to keep away from her all knowledge of sin, sorrow, the things that distract and torture the world. But I mustn’t be selfish about Vere. I mustn’t keep her wrapped in cotton wool. That is unwholesome. And, after all, Vere must have her life apart from me. Last night I realized that strongly.”
“Last night?”
“Yes, from the way in which she treated the Marchese, and later from something else. Last night Vere showed two sides of a woman’s nature—the capacity to hold her own, what is vulgarly called ‘to keep her distance,’ and the capacity to be motherly.”