"And Ruth?"
"Ruth is planning her wardrobe for Tuesday," Bee said tartly.
The Rector smiled a little. "The happy ones of the earth, the Ruths."
"But Simon…. How can one account for Simon?"
"I don't think that that is very difficult, you know. Simon would have had to be a saint to welcome back a brother who was going to supplant him. A brother, moreover, who has been dead to him since the age of thirteen."
"But, George, his twin! They were inseparable."
"I think that thirteen is further removed from twenty-one than almost any other equidistant points in life. It is a whole lifetime away. An association that ended at thirteen has little but sentimental value for the boy of twenty-one. Latchetts has been Simon's for-what is it? — eight years; he has known for eight years that he would come into his mother's money at twenty-one: to be deprived of all that without warning would upset a stronger character than Simon's."
"I expect I did it badly," Bee said. "The way I told them, I mean. I should have told Simon first, privately. But I did so want to keep them all on the same level. To pretend that they would all be equally glad. Taking Simon apart and telling him before the others would have-would have — "
"Anticipated the trouble."
"Yes. Something like that, I suppose. I suppose I had known quite well that his reaction would be-different from the others. And I just wanted to minimise the difference. I had never imagined for a moment, you see, that his reaction would be so violent. That he would go to the length of denying that Patrick was alive."