Perhaps he would have spoken, if his mind had not been so full of his late disappointment, and of his reviving hopes of still meeting Viola that evening. He could not bring himself immediately to the point of making a decision, and when Lady Brent had next spoken, and Wilbraham had answered her, the time had gone by for him to speak. His not having done so directly Bastian’s name had been mentioned would need explanation now. With a mental shrug of the shoulders he kept silence, and felt a warm delicious glow as he took the further step towards a fenced and guarded intimacy with Viola which no one outside must penetrate. The pleasure of hugging his secret afresh swamped the half-guilty feeling which had preceded it in his mind. He did not even ask himself why it should have come to him, but his attitude towards his elders underwent a slight change from that moment. His youth was to be defended from them; it had its rights, which could brook no interference. As he hurried off again to the trysting-place, he was glad once more that he had refrained from betraying his secret, as he had been glad that he had resisted the impulse to confide in his mother the night before. He knew now that they would have disapproved. Some breath from the outside world, which divides people up into categories in a way he had never had to take into account, had come to him from the discussion he had just listened to. His grandmother had shown persistent concern at Mrs. Ivimey’s having let her rooms without consultation with her. Such a thing had never happened before in Royd. You didn’t know what sort of people you might get, if it became a practice. An artist—there was no great harm perhaps in an artist; but— The postman had evidently not known, or if he had he had not told Wilbraham, that this particular artist had invaded the sanctities of Royd accompanied by a daughter, but Harry had felt instinctively that her presence would have increased the objections expressed by Lady Brent to Mrs. Ivimey’s taking in anybody at all. It had come to him somehow that Viola’s delicious charm would have done nothing to recommend her, had she been known, and that his mother would by no means have taken the confidence that it had been in his mind to make to her the night before in the spirit in which it would have been offered.