"I don’t know what you’re thinking about," she said, half sulkily. "I’d nothing to do with his meeting this girl. I did know her mother, as it happened, but hadn’t any idea that it was her mother. It isn’t through me any more than through you that he’s got himself mixed up with people like that." "That’s all that you can see in it, is it? People like that! You think this girl is like you were, when my poor Harry came across you. I loved my son, far more than you have it in you to love yours, but I know he was weak and foolish; and he was fitly mated. This Harry isn’t weak and foolish. Do you think he’d be likely to do what his father did? Is that all you know of him after all these years?" She tried to control herself. "You may say what you like about me," she said, in a voice that trembled a little. "I know you hate me and always have, for marrying your son, and still more for being Harry’s mother. But say what you like, Harry is doing exactly what his father did. Why should you take it for granted that this girl is any different to what I was? It’s just your spite against me. You haven’t seen her." "No, but you have." That hit her like a blow in the face. Always battering at the gates of her mind, to which she had never given it entrance, was the thought that Viola was surprisingly different from herself, surprisingly unlike what she would have expected her mother’s daughter to be, though in feature she resembled her. Still it was true that Lady Brent had not seen her, and could not know. "Her mother was an actress, no better than I was," she said, "—not so good in many ways. Her father is a scene-painter in a theatre, and drinks too. My father was a good man, though he may not have been what you’d call a gentleman. That’s what all your wonderful bringing up of Harry has led to. If he’d been brought up more naturally, and not everything and everybody sacrificed to keep him shut up down here, it’s very unlikely that this would have happened." "You think that, do you, in your loving wisdom? You had the boy always before you, and saw what he was growing into. So did I, and I trusted him. You couldn’t." "I don’t mind your sneers. At any rate, on the first opportunity he does what any other boy might do. He meets a girl and falls in love with her, and keeps it from us all the time he’s meeting her, and afterwards." "Keeps it from you, I suppose you mean." "Keeps it from all of us, I said. Did you know any more than I did that he had met this girl down here?" "Of course I knew." She could only sit and stare, with her mouth a little open. Whatever she may have thought of, it had never been this. Lady Brent did not treat her disclosure as a triumph to be dwelt upon. "How could I help knowing?" she went on. "I loved Harry. Nothing could have happened in his life to alter it that I shouldn’t have noticed. When I saw that something had happened I waited until it came to me what it was."