For Stella had united many things otherwise incompatible. We, (in future this ‘we’ must stand for your mother and me) walked alone when we could, and discussed the state of the different parties, and how they threatened to meet in conflict over her body. So far they did not more than threaten; but a man, or woman, of the world, George, for example or Kitty Maxse, might already foretell the supreme struggle of the future. Decency at present forbade open speech, but no doubt the suspicion was alive, and made itself felt in an unrest and intensity of feeling on George’s part which we saw, but failed as yet to interpret. George indeed had become and was to remain, a very important figure. He had advanced so suddenly into the closest intimacy with us, that it was not strange if in our blindfold state we made rash and credulous judgements about him. He had been once, when we were children, a hero to us; strong and handsome and just; he taught us to hold our bats straight and to tell the truth, and we blushed with delight if he praised. All the world so far as we could tell, applauded him too. Your grandmother showed keen delight in his presence, and, sentimental as children are, we believed that he was like her dead husband, and perhaps we were not wrong. His triumphs over Italian Countesses and watchmakers in the slums, who all revealed to him at once their inmost hearts, were part of our daily legend; and then he would play with us in the back garden, and pretend, for we guessed that it was pretence, that he read our school stories. His affections, his character, his soul, as we understood, were immaculate; and daily achieved that uncomfortable and mysterious victory which virtue, in books, achieves over intellect. Gerald, strange though it may seem, represented intellect in the contest. George was in truth, a stupid, good natured young man, of profuse, voluble affections, which during his mother’s lifetime were kept in check. When she died however, some restraint seemed to burst; he showed himself so sad, so affectionate, so boundlessly unselfish in his plans, that the voices of all women cried aloud in his praise, and men were touched by his modest virtues, at the same time that they were puzzled. What was it that made him so different from other men? Stupid he was, and good natured; but such qualities were not simple; they were modified, confused, distorted, exalted, set swimming in a sea of racing emotions until you were completely at a loss to know where you stood. Nature, we may suppose, had supplied him with abundant animal vigour, but she had neglected to set an efficient brain in control of it. The result was that all the impressions which the good priggish boy took in at school and college remained with him when he was a man; they were not extended, but were liable to be expanded into enormous proportions by violent gusts of passion and [he] proved more and more incapable of containing them. Thus, under the name of unselfishness he allowed himself to commit acts which a cleverer man would have called tyrannical; and, profoundly believing in the purity of his love, he behaved little better than a brute. How far he wilfully deceived himself, how far he was capable of understanding, what juggleries went on in that obscure mind, is a problem which we at any rate could never solve. But the combination of something like reason and much unlike anything but irrational instinct was for ever confusing us, deceiving us and leading us alternately to trust and suspect him, until his marriage happily made such speculations but an occasional diversion for the intellect.fn1 But at the moment his position seemed perfectly accountable; he was the simple domestic creature, of deep feeling, who, from native goodness now that his chief joy was gone, was setting himself to do all he could to be mother and sister and brother to us in one. He spent his holiday with us and was always ready to take your grandfather for a walk, to discuss her difficulties with Vanessa, to arrange little plans for our amusement. Who shall say that there was not some real affection in this? some effort to do what he thought right against his will? But who again can distinguish the good from the bad, the feeling from the sentiment, the truth from the pose? We however were simply credulous, and ready to impose our conventional heroic shape upon the tumult of his character. Virtue it seemed was always victorious. Such were the figures that seemed unnaturally brought together in the great whirlpool; and it did not need the eye of a seer to foretell collision, fracture, and at length a sundering of the parts. Where are we today, indeed, who used to stand so close?

At the end of the summer Jack pressed us very hard to spend a week at Corby; we were to soothe the first shock of his home-coming, or to know something which we could not know else; for when you examine feelings with the intense microscope that sorrow lends, it is amazing how they stretch, like the finest goldbeater’s skin, over immense tracts of substance. And we, poor children that we were, conceived it to be our duty evermore to go searching for these atoms, wherever they might lie sprinkled about the surface, the great mountains and oceans, of the world. It is pitiable to remember the hours we spent in such minute speculations. Either Jack expressed some wish, or we thought we guessed it, and then we must devise the appropriate solace, the tiny, but to us gigantic, inflection this way or that, of the course of events. And so some grain would be saved, or some pin-point closed, and our immense task of piecing together all the torn fragments of his life would progress by the breadth of an atom. Jack himself could not recognize what we were doing for him in its detail; but he certainly had come to realize the mass of our, say rather of Vanessa’s, endeavour.