He did not, however, admit to a childish feeling of homelessness or to having been lonely in Munich and bored in Dresden, while several people had been rude to him in Berlin. He did just glance for a moment tentatively at his mother, then he gulped the admission down; he drew in his feet and stared a little haggardly round the drawing-room. He may have guessed they were not likely to come nearer to each other than these precipitate little plunges into intimacy, this succession of rendezvous, would bring them.

Round him stripes prevailed, on the tight brocades of the upholstery, on the mats methodically diamond-wise on the polish; stripes were repeated innumerably in the satiny wallpaper and the lace blinds over the door. One had a sense of being caged into this crowded emptiness. This seemed the strangest place to sit and make demands on motherhood, the strangest place for motherhood, answering, to make itself palpable. He felt impelled to ask his mother some fantastic question: ‘What do I mean to you?’ or ‘What part do I play in your life?’ or even (a final outrage), ‘Do you care for me?’ (This he could not remember that she had ever avowed.) Even were the putting of such questions conceivable, a direct reply from her here was not; there must ensue some cataclysm, the stretched brocades would rip audibly, the potbellied vases crack. His most daring conception of an intimacy was that there would be freedom to ask or to answer such questions; though he also conceived that in such an intimacy the reserves would have trebly their value.

‘It will be dull for you here,’ said his mother, interpreting his vague scrutiny. ‘I do nothing at all all day long, so I haven’t had time for a feeling of rootlessness, but if I’d known you were coming out I’d have taken a villino. Sydney found me the nicest little villino stuck to the side of a rock and wanted to take it for both of us, but it would have meant the dear muzzy cousin with the inside coming too, and that Sydney wouldn’t consider; though she couldn’t for a moment, either, consider leaving the cousin. So the idea dropped. A pity, I think now,’ Mrs Kerr said reflectively.

‘A disappointment for Sydney.’

‘I’m afraid they seem inevitable. She is a very disappointable girl. But it really is a pity from our point of view, because she’d be moving out now and you would be moving in. How long is it, I wonder, since you and I have kept house? Perhaps I have deprived you of something? – I cannot feel that I have.’

‘The idea that you should what is called “live for me” is quite barbarous,’ said Ronald reassuringly.

‘Yet I cannot disentangle myself from the idea that it isn’t right for a woman not to be a little barbarous.’