“Oh, there’s nothing to tell, really.  It’s not a definite worry.  It’s to do”—­his dark eyes left her and travelled among the gathering shadows of the room—­“with my mother.”

If he had kissed her now he would not have found her lips so soft.  “Your mother?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said petulantly.  It struck her that there was something infantile about his tone, a shade of resentment much as a child might feel against its nurse.  “She’s been the centre of my whole life.  And now ...  I don’t know whether she cares for me at all.  I don’t believe she ever cared for anybody but my father.  It’s puzzling.”

His eyes were fixed on the shadows.  He had quite forgotten her.  She leant back on the pillows, closing her eyes to try and master a feeling of faintness, and stretched out her hand towards his lips.

He dropped a kiss on it and went on:  “So, you see, I fell back on you for consolation, and somehow at that moment love went out of me.  It’s funny the change it makes in everything.  I became—­so conventional.  When you ran in here and slammed the door on me, I didn’t follow you because I was conscious that I oughtn’t to come into your room.  Afterwards, when suddenly I loved you again and I wanted to come and be forgiven by you, I didn’t care a damn for any rule.”  Their lips met again.  She had to dissemble a faint surprise that at this moment he should think about anything so trivial as the rule that a man should not come into a woman’s bedroom.  “Ellen, it was beastly.  Really, I don’t get any more fun out of it than you did.  I lost my soul.  I didn’t feel anything for you that I’ve ever felt.  I simply felt a sort of generalised emotion ... that any man might have felt for any woman....  It wasn’t us....”  The corners of his mouth were drawn down by self-disgust.  “Perhaps I am like my father,” he said loathingly.  “He was a vile man.”  Again he forgot her, and again she laid her hand on his lips.  When his thoughts came back to her he looked happier, though he had to think of her penitently.  “I was a beast,” he went on, “the coldest, cruellest beast.  Do you know why I raged at you when you mentioned that little snipe you call Mr. Philip?  I knew it was the roughest luck on you to have gone through that time with him.  But I wasn’t sorry for you.  I was jealous.  I felt you might have protected yourself from being looked at by any other man in the world except me, though I knew perfectly you had to earn your living, and I ought to make it my business to see that you’re specially happy to make up for those months you spent up in that office with those lustful old swine.”

She checked him.  He was speaking out of that special knowledge which she had not got and for lack of which she felt inferior and hoodwinked, and what he said to her suggested to her that a part of her life which she had thought she had perfectly understood was a mystery from which she was debarred by ignorance.  “What do you mean?” she cried deridingly, as if there were no such knowledge.  “Why do you call them lustful?”