As he hurried off again to the trysting-place, he was glad once more that he had refrained from betraying his secret, as he had been glad that he had resisted the impulse to confide in his mother the night before. He knew now that they would have disapproved. Some breath from the outside world, which divides people up into categories in a way he had never had to take into account, had come to him from the discussion he had just listened to. His grandmother had shown persistent concern at Mrs. Ivimey's having let her rooms without consultation with her. Such a thing had never happened before in Royd. You didn't know what sort of people you might get, if it became a practice. An artist--there was no great harm perhaps in an artist; but-- The postman had evidently not known, or if he had he had not told Wilbraham, that this particular artist had invaded the sanctities of Royd accompanied by a daughter, but Harry had felt instinctively that her presence would have increased the objections expressed by Lady Brent to Mrs. Ivimey's taking in anybody at all. It had come to him somehow that Viola's delicious charm would have done nothing to recommend her, had she been known, and that his mother would by no means have taken the confidence that it had been in his mind to make to her the night before in the spirit in which it would have been offered.
The reasons for all this were not clear to him. He had of course no idea that he was to be preserved at all costs from falling into unauthorized love; he had no more than a purely academic knowledge of what falling in love meant, and no idea as yet that he was already very deep in it himself. There were many things in which his inclinations had clashed with the rules formulated by his elders--as, for instance, in the matter of visits to the stables, during his early childhood. This was one of them, but he was not to be bound now by the views of his elders, and it was not necessary to examine their origin. There was a vague discomfort in the idea that he was setting himself against them, but no admission in his mind that he was in any way wrong in doing so. And even the slight discomfort was more than balanced by the feeling that his secret must certainly now be guarded, which had the effect of somehow bringing him and Viola more closely together.