Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/258

 had her legitimate grievance. What a pity that she was not other than she was, and able to take a share! But that again was the trouble. She would emphasize in Kit all those qualities that make for dispersion and failure, and produce those half-lives, those wounded efforts and dreary bafflements.

"He has got to go through with it all," was all that Sorrell could say.

He imagined that his anxiety resembled the anxiety of a father whose one and beloved son had gone to the trenches. Nothing that he could do would alter the inevitable. But why the inevitable? Was not the whole problem unnatural, the product of conventions and repressions?

He was grateful to the woman who understood him, and whose understanding came as a surprise and an assuagement. In the winter darkness he would hear a soft tapping of fingers upon his window, and he would rise and let her in.

"You're worried about Kit."

Her supreme common sense was like a cool hand laid upon his forehead.

"London, you know, Fanny."

"Well,—what about it? Didn't you have your share of London?"

"I did."

"And here you are. You had to worry it out. So will Kit."

"I know. But one longs to give the boy the right solution."

"There isn't a right solution,—only one's own—my dear. We are not as young as we were. Interference doesn't work. What worked in our day,—see? Kit's got ballast."

"I have tried to help him in every way."

"Yes,—and a boy like Kit will find out how to help himself. Don't you see? We have to."

Moreover, she insisted upon the woman's point of view, and was at pains to remind Sorrell that there was a woman's point of view.

"You men talk, Stephen, as though it was all our fault. The old Eve idea. You men run after us, and then curse oe for making you do it,—which we don't, not always. Be fair."

Sorrell agreed that it was dangerous to generalize, and