He entered his familiar room, looked with disgust at his dinner-jacket and trousers lying upon the bed (he hated dressing for dinner), and then wandered up and down, dragging a book from the book-case and pushing it impatiently back again, stumbling over his evening slippers, pulling his coat off and allowing it to fall, unregarded, on to the floor. Katherine!... Katherine?... What was ‘up’ with Katherine? He had, in any case, been greatly upset by the events of the day. The crisis for which he had so long been waiting had at length arrived, and, behold, it had been no crisis at all. Superficially it had been nothing ... in its reality it had shaken, finally, destructively, the foundations of everything upon which his life had been built. He remembered, very clearly, the family’s comments upon the case of a young man known to them all, who, engaged to a girl in Polchester, had confessed, just before the marriage, that he had had a mistress for several years in London, who was however now happily married to a gentleman of means and had no further claim on him. The engagement had been broken off, with the approval of all the best families in Glebeshire. Henry remembered that his mother had said that it was not only the immorality of the young man but also his continued secrecy concerning the affair that was so abominable, that, of course, “young men must be young men, but you couldn’t expect a nice girl”—and so on. He remembered all this very clearly, and he had decided at the time that if he ever had a mistress he would take very good care that no one knew about her. That had been a year ago ... and now! He was bewildered, almost breathless with a kind of dismayed terror as to what the world might possibly be coming to. His mother! of whom at least one thing had surely been unalterable—that she, herself, would never change. And now she had taken this thing without horror, without anger, almost with complacency. She had known of it for months! It was as though he had cherished a pet with the happy conviction that it was a kitten and had suddenly discovered it to be a cub. And out of this confusion of a wrecked and devastated world there emerged the conviction “that there was something more behind all this”, that “his mother had some plan.” He did not see at all what her plan could possibly be, but she appeared before him now as a sinister and menacing figure, someone who had been close to him for so many years, but whose true immensity he had never even remotely perceived.