There spoke the very spirit and essence of wickedness, and yet Violet felt that it struggled for utterance, fighting its way to his lips. His purpose was plain, but there was something which contested it, an impediment that threatened its free exercise. He, so she guessed, was aware of it too, for though he had never been in more deadly and bitter a mood, never swifter with those characteristic gibes that pierced and stung, she felt that there was an effort about them, as if the bow that shot them had to be strung again and again instead of being always ready. In superficial and trivial ways also, in the days that followed, that struggle, whatever it was, seemed to manifest itself in strange little indecisions which irritated him and made him unlike himself. One day, for instance, he would tell her that connubial solitude, with an immortal grandmother thrown in, was too delicate a form of happiness, and that he would go up to London that afternoon, and an hour later he would have changed his mind, and told her to ask down a party for the week-end. Then, before she had done that, he would change his mind again, and say that he wanted nobody, and spent the day rambling about the park, or, in this hot spell of May weather, bathing and basking by the lake. Another day he started off to drive to Eton and see Dennis, to whom he had promised an early visit, but when that evening she asked him how Dennis was, he told her he had not been there.
They were at dinner, just the three of them, when he rapped this out at her, and it roused in old Lady Yardley some dim, disordered train of thought, for she began to speak in that level monotone which came out of her twilight mists.
“Yes, much wiser, much wiser,” she said. “Let there be no force, not even persuasion. Let him come to it naturally: it is bred in the bone. Do not make him drink of the spring: he will be thirsty someday, and then he will go to it.”
“Go to what, Granny?” he said. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“Aha, I am talking of what I know and what you know. We talk in parables that are plain to us. He knew, too--that man who never comes here now. Yes, and yet another. They have both gone. Only Colin and I are left now, and the chapel is empty.”