As I begin to think of them together I remember how the maternal note appeared in her talk about him.
‘His youth is pathetic,’ she told me, ‘but there is nothing that he does not understand.’
‘Don’t apologize, Judy,’ I said. We were so brusque on the frontier. Besides, the matter still suffered a jocular presentment. Mrs. Harbottle and Mr. Chichele were still ‘great friends’; we could still put them next each other at our dinner-parties without the feeling that it would be ‘marked.’ There was still nothing unusual in the fact that when Mrs. Harbottle was there Mr. Chichele might be taken for granted. We were so broad-minded also, on the frontier.
It grew more obvious, the maternal note. I began positively to dread it, almost as much, I imagine, as Somers did. She took her privileges all in Anna’s name, she exercised her authority quite as Lady Chichele’s proxy. She went to the very limit. ‘Anna Chichele,’ she said actually in his presence, ‘is a fortunate woman. She has all kinds of cleverness, and she has her tall son. I have only one little talent, and I have no tall son.’ Now it was not in nature that she could have had a son as tall as Somers, nor was that desire in her eyes. All civilization implies a good deal of farce, but this was a poor refuge, a cheap device; I was glad when it fell away from her sincerity, when the day came on which she looked into my fire and said simply, ‘An attachment like ours has no terms.’
‘For what comes and goes,’ she went on dreamily, ‘how could there be a formula?’
‘Look here, Judy,’ I said, ‘you know me very well. What if the flesh leaps with the spirit?’
She looked at me, very white. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘no.’
I waited, but there seemed nothing more that she could say; and in the silence the futile negative seemed to wander round the room repeating itself like an echo, ‘Oh no, no.’ I poked the fire presently to drown the sound of it. Judy sat still, with her feet crossed and her hands thrust into the pockets of her coat, staring into the coals.
‘Can you live independently, satisfied with your interests and occupations?’ she demanded at last. ‘Yes, I know you can. I can’t. I must exist more than half in other people. It is what they think and feel that matters to me, just as much as what I think and feel. The best of life is in that communication.’