It is not during constant intercourse and association that influence gives birth to new comprehension. These fill the foreground; they loom too large in present interest to allow of a penetrating vision. The vision, the perception, the discernment, growing from vague abstractions to poignancy, come later, growing very slowly from seeds sown unnoticed. From the carelessly received seeds the plant pushes its gradual, painful way upwards, breaking the earth to make a place for itself, growing, perhaps, to be a tree, striking and spreading roots all through the upheaved soil.
So it began to be with the Crevequers. Absence and time began now their inevitable work. Atmosphere, doubtless at the time absorbed, but unconsciously, now sent its message from system to brain. Retrospect meant the slow beginnings of perception; therefore they fought against retrospect. What at the time had passed them serenely by, came back to memory in strange new lights. What at the time had been bewildering, put on, day by day, robes of increasingly translucent clearness. What at the time they had known, unheeding and uncaring, assumed a vividness quite new. With the accidentals of intercourse no longer overlaying, wrapping up and entangling the issues, these pushed a slow way out, and emerged at last, standing forth unconfused and unadorned, bald in their lucid simplicity.
Through the slow days and long nights retrospect gave birth thus to a glimmering perception; perception, its gropings not to be checked, to comprehension.
In the Crevequers' eyes the melancholy pondering grew more noticeable than before. Their brows sometimes drew together suddenly, as if, in the straying of their thoughts, they had lit upon something they did not like.
Of the Venables they spoke to each other less day by day. Each did not know how it fared with the other; each hardly knew how it fared with himself. It was well, perhaps, that during much of the day they had plenty to do. But there were the evenings. It was certainly a pity that they had begun to find convivial evenings so little amusing to them. Except when their friends came to see them they sat alone together. After a little while, when retrospect had taken them some way, they would often, by reading or talking, try to keep it at bay. But it was, at best, only a question of deferring; there remained always the nights. It was in the nights, of course, that retrospect most tyrannically had its way. The masterless nights are escaped steeds run loose for anybody's annexing. Retrospect annexed them, and rode them hard. In the nights, at all events, there is no confusing of issues, no foreground to obscure the vision.
It took a succession of nights and days for perception to reach full stature. Each, lying awake, or sitting together through the evenings while Tommy drew pictures for Marchese Peppino, caught new aspects of the things which moved in progression through their memory.
It seemed that each of the Venables family, marching through memory, flung at the Crevequers something which retrospect could turn into a ball for its game.
From Miranda Betty collected guileless remarks in inverted commas (some of the inverted commas Miranda had supplied, some Betty filled in now) as to 'different sorts of people,' and how each sort had its own conventions and its own resorts. Plaints, also, about liberty of association tampered with—Miranda was a veritable garden for such flowers. There was also that day at the Trattoria Buonaventura, with Warren Venables standing at the door, impassive, observing, unable to linger because his mother was anxious....
Then, in the procession, marched Mrs. Venables. Mrs. Venables had one day sloughed a self. She had not liked doing so; it was a self she valued; her most natural self, also—the æsthetic self, so easily and so deeply struck. From this self she had reluctantly emerged temporarily to stand forth a reputable, conventional Philistine—more, a maternal Philistine, of all creatures the most bornée. Driven by circumstances, she had talked to Betty Crevequer on the subject of friendship, its uses and abuses. A certain impersonal detachment she had used, choosing her words with careful discretion, to throw as much veil as might be over the maternal Philistinism. She had not wanted to hurt Betty, nor had she at all wanted that Betty should in her mind call her bornée. She might have been relieved to know that this was a word only in the Crevequers' vocabulary as culled second-hand from herself, and stored in the same carefully treasured category with 'standpoint' and 'forceful.' Not knowing this, she had really shown some self-sacrifice in taking her risks. To minimize them she had laid stress on the purely æsthetic protests that her taste made, leaving propriety aside. A certain refinement she herself exacted from those whom she selected for companionship—she began quite a long way off, in her anxiety for impersonal detachment; how should Betty have grasped it?—and she would have others exact it too. If youth is to lower the value of the precious jewel, its friendship, bringing it down to common—very common—earth, youth will inevitably be the poorer. There is, after all, something in the belief so widely current about touching pitch.... To lounge about the streets—to be exact, outside the doors of a theatre—at midnight, in company with people of the stamp of Betty's companions of last night——
'Gina?' Betty had wondered. 'And Luli? But——'