I know there’s a great deal to be said for her.  I had wired to them from Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening.  It wasn’t my fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to the Thesigers to inform them of the fact.  I ought to have remembered that Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn’t yet know he’d done.

The maternal passion is a terrible thing.  It has made women commit crimes.  It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car.  It made her say, “You’ve brought my son-in-law.  What have you done with my son?”

(To do her justice, she hadn’t seen what had happened to Jimmy.  Though he was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held him tight.)

And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola had for Jevons.  It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat slung loose over his right shoulder), “You can see what we’re doing with my husband.”

And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that Reggie was all right, but that we’d had to send him to the military hospital, it made her say, “If it wasn’t for your son-in-law your son wouldn’t be alive.”

God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what secret anguish she avenged.

They were all there, the Thesiger women—­they had come, you see, to meet Reggie—­Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her.  But it was Mildred who saw.  She spoke to her mother.

“Can’t you see?” she said.

Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat.  She looked at me and said, “Please take them away somewhere and tell them.  Jimmy is so tired.”

I know that must seem awful.  It was awful to come back from the battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see the women flashing fire at each other.  And they were mother and daughter.  But, you see, they were women.  I know that the war should have purged them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is your lover and your son your son for all that.

And it wasn’t easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could have saved her son.  I am not sure that she wouldn’t have thought it presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone her son.  There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons.  You know what she said about his going to the front.