Chapter 15

On Saturday Stephen would have to go up to London for his two last Lenten sermons in the City, and Catherine made up her mind that she would stay over the week-end, because he wouldn’t then be there to be oppressed by her, and she would go away on Monday before he came back.

Gradually, in bed on Friday morning during the interval between drinking her tea and getting up, she came to this decision. In the morning light—the sun was shining that day—it seemed rather amusing than otherwise that her son-in-law should so quickly have come to the end of his powers of enduring her. Hers, after all, was to be the conventional fate of mothers-in-law. And she had supposed herself so much nicer than most! She thought, ‘How funny,’ and tried to see it as altogether amusing; but it was not altogether amusing. ‘You’re vain,’ she then rebuked herself.

Yes; she would follow Mrs. Colquhoun’s example, and stay in her own home. Perhaps that was the secret of Mrs. Colquhoun’s success as a mother-in-law, and she, very obviously, was a success. She would emulate her; and from her own home defy Christopher.

It was all owing to him that she had ever left her home. How unfortunate that she should have come across somebody so mad. Oughtn’t Stephen and his mother, if they knew the real reason for her appearance in their midst, applaud her as discreet? What could a woman do more proper than, in such circumstances, run away? But they would be too profoundly shocked by the real reason to be able to do anything but regard her, she was sure, with horror. Her, not Christopher. And she was afraid their attitude would be natural. ‘We grandmothers... ‘

Catherine turned red. Mercifully, no one would ever know. Down here, in this atmosphere where she was regarded as coeval with Mrs. Colquhoun, those encounters with Christopher seemed infinitely worse than in London, —so bad, indeed, that they hardly seemed real. She would go back on Monday, declining to be kept out of her own home longer, and take firm steps. Christopher should never see her again. If he tried to, she would write a letter that would clear his mind for ever, and she would, for what was left to her of life, proceed with undeviating dignity along her allotted path to old age. And after all, what could he really do? Between her and him there was, first, the hall porter, and then Mrs. Mitcham. To both of these she would give precise instructions.

In this state of mind, a state more definite than any she had been in that week, as if a ray of light, pale and wintry, but yet light, had straggled for a moment through the mists, did Catherine get up that morning; but not in this state of mind did she that evening go to bed, for by the evening she had made a further discovery, and one that took away what still was left of her vitality: Virginia was tired of her too.