“But I’m talking with absurd assurance. Putting Katherine entirely aside there is all the family to deal with. Trenchard himself likes me—Mrs. Trenchard hates me. That’s not a bit too strong, and the strange thing is that there’s no reason at all for it that I can see, nor have we been, either of us, from the beginning anything but most friendly to one another. If she suspected that I was in love with Katherine I might understand it, but that is impossible. There has been nothing, I swear, to give anyone the slightest suspicion. She detects, I think, something foreign and strange in me. Russia of course she views with the deepest suspicion, and it would amuse you to hear her ideas of that country. Nothing, although she has never been near it nor read anything but silly romances about it, could shake her convictions. Because I don’t support them she knows me for a liar. She is always calm and friendly to me, but her intense dislike comes through it all. And yet I really like her. She is so firm and placid and determined. She adores her family—she will fight for them to the last feather and claw. She is so sure and so certain about everything, and yet I believe that in her heart she is always afraid of something—it’s out of that fear, I am sure, that her hatred of me comes. For the others, the only one who troubled about me was the boy, and he is the strangest creature. He’d like me to give him all my experiences: he hasn’t the slightest notion of them, but he’s morbidly impatient of his own inexperience and the way his family are shutting him out of everything, and yet he’s Trenchard enough to disapprove violently of that wider experience if it came to him. He’d like me, for instance, to take him out and show him purple restaurants, ladies in big hats, and so on. If he did so he’d feel terribly out of it and then hate me. He’s a jumble of the crudest, most impossible and yet rather touching ideas, enthusiasms, indignations, virtues, would-be vices. He adores his sister. About that at least he is firm—and if I were to harm her or make her unhappy!...