René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house, which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair, needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet, assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes he sent away were bulky and bulging.
One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read, realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother's sexual life so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the letter up, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not escape, but found himself plunged in confession:
"Well, I never! You're not going to be married now?"
"No. It's hopeless. She's rich. At least her father is."
"So that's why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can't expect them to be all alike."
"It isn't only that. Only I can't get away from certain things."
"You'll be kept busy if you worry about that."
"I mean, George and I used to talk--you know. Well, it got beyond talk. Uncle Alfred gave me ten shillings once. I spent it--that way."
"You can't dismiss it like that. I shouldn't be remembering it if it were so easy as that. I met her--you know--in Derby Street----"
"You're not going to tell me the whole story?"
"I must tell someone. I met her and she took me down a lot of streets. She walked along briskly in a business-like way, and I slunk along behind with my coat collar turned up and my cap over my eyes, and I kept shivering, though it wasn't cold. We came to a little house and she knocked at the door, and a fat woman with red arms came to it. She just looked at us and said: 'Full up.' We went on to another little house, but I couldn't get that out of my mind, and the room there was so horrible that I ran away, and that's all."