‘Oh, my dear boy,’ she interrupted, shocked at such a picture of herself, ‘don’t talk like that. It’s really dreadful. I’ve never done anything frantically in my life.’ ‘I’m going to make you.’ ‘Oh--oh....’ She was scandalised. She said quickly, ‘I ought to have told you ages ago about Virginia--when first you began saying foolish things.’ ‘I don’t care a hang about Virginia, whoever she may be.’ ‘She’s my daughter.’ ‘What do I care?’ ‘She’s grown up.’ ‘She must have grown very fast, then.’ ‘Please don’t be silly. She’s not only grown up, she’s married. So now, perhaps, you’ll understand----’ ‘George was married before, then?’ he said. ‘No. She’s my daughter. My very own. So now you’ll understand----’ ‘That you’re older than I am. I knew that. I could see that.’ How unaccountable one is, thought Catherine; for when he said this she was conscious of a small stab of chagrin. ‘But you see now how <i>much</i> older,’ she said. ‘Much! Little! What words. I don’t know what they mean. You’re you. And you’re me as well. As though I cared for any Virginia, fifty times married. My business is only with you, and yours only with me----’ ‘I haven’t got any business with you.’ ‘Shut her out. Forget her----’ ‘Shut out Virginia?’ ‘Be just you. Be just me.’ ‘Oh, you’re absolutely mad.’ ‘Catherine, you’re not going to let the fact that you were born before me separate us?’ She stared at him in astonishment and dismay. Virginia as a cure had failed. It was at once excessively warming to her vanity and curiously humiliating to her sense of decency. The last twelve years of her life, since George’s death, as the widowed mother of a daughter who during them grew up, was taken out, became engaged and married, had so much accustomed her to her position as a background,--necessary, even important, but only a background for the young creature who was to have all the money directly she married with her mother’s consent or came of age,--that to be dragged out of this useful obscurity, so proper, as she had long considered, to her age, and her friends and relations had considered it so also, to be dragged out with real violence into the very front of the stage, forced to be the prima donna of the piece of whom it was suddenly passionately demanded that she should sing, shocked and humiliated her. Yet, over and through this feeling of wounded decency washed a queer warm feeling of gratified vanity. She was still, then, if taken by herself, away from Virginia, who up to three months before had always been at her side, attractive; she was still so apparently young, so outwardly young, that Christopher evidently altogether failed to visualise Virginia. It really was a feather in a woman’s cap. But then the recollection that this young man was just the right age for Virginia overwhelmed her, and she turned away with a quick flush of shame. ‘I have my pride,’ she remarked. ‘Pride! What has pride to do with love?’