Solly was wretched, for he thought his heart was broken. Very probably it was so, in the meaning which is usually attached to the phrase. Most hearts of any quality are broken on two or three occasions in a lifetime. They mend, of course, and are often stronger than before, but something of the essence of life is lost at every break. Still, hurt as he was, he could not see Pearl weep unmoved. He took her in his arms, and comforted her as well as he could, and for a time they were miserable together.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you threw me into that bay,” said Pearl, when she felt a little better, and had been accommodated with a clean handkerchief out of Solly’s breast pocket. “I’ve been a self-centred fool. I talked endlessly about myself and what this meant to me, and now you’ve lost Griselda. Everybody knows how much you loved her.”

“Yes,” said Solly, “I’m afraid I have been rather obvious for a couple of years. Well, I don’t care. I suppose it’s better to feel something and look a fool than to take damned good care to feel nothing, and be a fool.”

“Would it help if I wrote to her? I could explain everything.”

“No you couldn’t. This doesn’t really concern you. I knew some good friend would be quick to tell Griselda. They even went to the expense of a cable. I’m sure it was a relief to her. She never cared much about me, really. I’m certain that cable means every word it says, quite literally. She’d be happy to think I had stopped crying for the moon, and had taken up with somebody else. Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Please don’t feel guilty,” said Pearl. “I said dreadful things to you. You must loathe me.”

“I don’t loathe anybody,” said Solly, “except myself.”

But Pearl was not to be denied self-abasement. “I’m not very good about other people’s feelings,” said she. And then, much more fully than she had ever been able to confide in Norman Yarrow, she told Solly about her life at home. About the division which her mother’s religiosity and her father’s agnosticism had made there. About the hard egotism, rising sometimes almost to the point of madness, which possessed him. About the life she led between them, torn this way and that, and cut off from young people, from ordinary pleasures, and with little before her save a continuance of this weary course, ending undoubtedly in the bitter role of the unmarried daughter who nurses both parents into the grave. She spoke without self-pity, but she spoke with point.

Solly was horrified. “My God,” said he. “It’s monstrous. Of course everybody knows you have a grim time in that house, but everybody’s always thought of it as a kind of joke. They’re horrible.”

Pearl shook her head. “No,” said she, “that isn’t it at all. They have done everything they have done out of love. They loved each other very much, and I think they still do, if they could hear one another, in their private worlds. And they loved me as much as they were able. They did the best for me that they could—the best they knew. Don’t try to persuade me to think differently now. It’s all I can bear at home now—more than I can bear for long, I know. But in spite of it all I love them very much.”

Solly’s heart, which had contracted and grown hard that afternoon, when he received Griselda’s cable, seemed to melt and beat freely now for the first time.

“I know what you mean,” said he. “It’s much the same with my mother. I’m tied to her apron strings. I’m a joke, I know. Griselda was very bitter about it once. But filial piety isn’t simply a foolish phrase. It’s a hard reality. Some people never seem to feel it. In happy families it is never put to any real test. But duty to parents is an obligation that some of us must recognize. However hellish parents may be, the duty is as real as the duty that exists in marriage. God, what a lot we hear about unhappy marriages, and how little we hear about unhappy sons and daughters. There’s no divorce for them. You’ve told me about your parents. Well—you know my mother. And that reminds me that it’s half-past ten, and she won’t go to sleep till I come home, and she needs sleep.”

Saying no more, he started the car and drove Pearl back to her door.

“Good night,” said she, and held out her hand to him.

Solly turned toward her. His face was set and white. But as their eyes met his expression softened, until he smiled.

“ ‘Ah, lovely hellsnake, wilt thou stare at me?’ “ he whispered.

“Heavysege?” said Pearl.

He nodded, and for the second time that day they laughed together. Solly suddenly seized Pearl, and kissed her again and again. Then, once more he seemed to be angry.

“Damn it all,” said he, “haven’t you any name but Pearl?”

“I’ve got a sainf s name,” she said. “Veronica.”

“That’s a little better,” said Solly, and kissed her again.

“I must go in,” she said, struggling free.

“Yes,” said he, and this time the shadow of Wednesday night did not divide but united them.

Solly tiptoed up the stairs, but the light under his mother’s door was shining, as he knew it would be. He tapped and went in.

“You’re late, lovey,” said Mrs Bridgetower. Without her teeth, and with her thin long hair in a braid, she was both pitiable and terrible.

“Not really, Mother. It’s a little after eleven.”

“It always seems late when you’re out, dear,”

“Sorry. Now you must go to sleep.”

“Where were you, dear?”

“Just out, Mother.”

“Dearie, it hurts me so to be shut out of your confidence.”

“Oh, you know I haven’t been up to anything very terrible.”

“Dearie, I’m worried.”

“What about, Mother?”

“I’m worried that I’m going to lose my little boy.”

Oh God, thought Solly, here we go. She’s coming the pitiable over me. There ought to be rules for these encounters—an inter-generation agreement about hitting below the belt.

“Well, and how do you expect to lose him this time?”

Mrs Bridgetower had had a sedative pill, and was groggy, but Solly knew her well enough to know that she could be most dangerous when at her groggiest. She spoke lispingly from her toothless mouth.

“Dearie, there’s nothing in it about this girl, is there?”

“What girl?”

“This horrid Vambrace girl.”

“She’s not horrid, Mother. You know her.”

“The whole family is horrid. Dearie, say there’s nothing in it.”

“But, Mother, you know the whole thing began as a practical joke.”

The old eyes filled with tears; the old chin quivered a little.

“Then say it, lovey. Mother wants to hear you say it. There’s nothing in it, is there?”

“Now, Mother dearest, you must get off to sleep, or you won’t be able to get up tomorrow.”

Solly kissed his mother and turned off her bedside lamp. A night-light glowed from the floor. As he reached the door his mother’s voice came to him, lisping still, but sharp and without assumed infantile charm.

“I wouldn’t like it to be said that my marriage had begun as the result of a practical joke.”

He closed the door and hastened to his attic. What a demon she was! It was impossible to conceal anything from her. She could smell a change of emotion in him!

Yet what Pearl had confided to him about her family life had strengthened him, and as he lay in his bed he pitied his mother. And the more he pitied his mother, the more he thought of Pearl, until he could think of nothing else.

Veronica; as Veronica she seemed to be someone quite new.

Mrs Bridgetower also lay awake, and her heart yearned toward her son. He was all that she had in life. All—save a large house and nearly half a million dollars, very shrewdly invested. Her heart longed toward him.

How easy, how utterly simple, for Solly to turn back to Mother—to drive away the powerful but still strange vision of Veronica, and to give himself to Mother forever! Should he run down the stairs and into her room now, to kiss her, and tell her that he would be her little boy forever? Thus life and death warred in Solly’s bosom in the night, and in her bedroom his mother lay, yearning for him, willing him to come to her.