Warren was everywhere; retrospect, exploiting him, never came to an end. It was strange, it was marvellous, how it was possible to miss things—things that so stared one in the face. Yet, how should one have known? There was no reason why one should know now; only the slow pervasion of atmosphere, that enabled one to look at things with such strangely new eyes, the eyes, doubtless, of others, with the added illumination of the subjective standpoint. This illumination shed its fiery light, growing from glimmer to flame through the masterless nights, upon the things Warren had said and done, the things they had done together, the things he would not have suggested, not contemplated even in thought, if he had regarded her as one of his own 'sort of people,' sharing his conventions. Who should blame him? He had been adequately justified; she had shown herself from the very outset—he had no doubt waited to be sure of it, so as not to risk insult—of a sort of people immeasurably different: so different that she had not even grasped the difference, had only not been surprised at hints of it because they had passed her so serenely by. They had passed clear over her head; dragged back through space by retrospect, they struck her full in the face.
She saw, in the blinding light of an illuminative moment, Warren's attitude towards a girl placed by him among his own 'sort of people'; she saw him brushing aside, lest they should touch and smirch her, the Ginas, the Morellos, the Lulis, who might have crossed her path; she saw his considerate respect, his equal comradeship.
She had given him no chance of respecting her, had he tried to do so. The things crowded back.... On the evening after the first lunch-party he had met her in the street alone at midnight. He had walked home with her; she read into his manner now a touch of the protective regard that she imagined in him towards his own sort. But it had been tinged with uncertainty; even then he had probably known her. Not to risk misjudging her, however, he had walked with her to her home, assuming, doubtfully, that she had lost her escort.
It had not taken many days to confirm the doubt, to obviate all necessity for such assumption.
And then—how they had played together! Each had been so contented with the other; they had had such fun. Retrospect with the search-light could not quite spoil that—not all of it. But it did its best; it dragged it through the mud till it was hidden, inches deep.
Prudence Varley would have seen a flimsy screen toppling over with a crash, revealing the lurker behind with his contemptuous smile. So Betty too very bitterly saw him: but she was aware also that the smile was not all contempt. Only the contempt, real or imagined, poisoned the rest.
The search-light flashed over the large, tolerant acceptance, so unsurprised, so unremonstrating, so uncriticizing, which had at the time missed its message. It did not miss now. She saw herself accepted, Tommy accepted, their friends accepted; all the things they did, their ways of life, taken easily, without surprise, with scorn lurking behind the screen. Their unpaid debts, and eluded duns; their disreputable haunts, their more disreputable friends, their street-loafing, their very dress.... Even at the outset Tommy had said: 'We don't dress well enough. I want a new hat; so do you.' So that obvious discrimination between 'sorts of people' their elementary perceptions had made at once; they had reached just up to that, and no higher.
The question of discrimination brought the quick question, What share of the gift had the Venables? For there were discriminations that might be made, between the things that the Crevequers had done, and other things that they had not done—things from which they had been kept, perhaps, less by any code, moral or conventional, than by the inherent force of inherited tendency, which, strike what new and individual roads we will, will not cease to follow us along them. The question of the discriminating powers of the Venables Betty left. She simply did not know.
All the time, while the search-light glared over the things that Warren had said and done, there remained, outlined lucidly against the background, the things that Prudence Varley had not said and not done. She, with her tacit omissions, was the influence almost preponderating. Her atmosphere was the most deeply absorbed—the rarefied atmosphere of the studio. Across the gulf of months Betty met the direct, far-seeing look, which took in all and gave out nothing. It had waited for its interpretation till now.
With the interpretation—which was that of things held back, reserved—Betty came to evolve a discrimination. The discrimination was between two attitudes. Both had held back something; neither had given unreservedly. One had held back all of friendship, offering nothing; the other had given friendship, withholding from it an element—the element of respect.