During the six months that had elapsed since her visit to Miss Fenno
she had been conscious of a pain of which she had supposed herself
no longer capable: as a man will continue to feel the ache of an
amputated arm. She had fancied that all her centres of feeling had
been transferred to Alan; but she now found herself subject to a
kind of dual suffering, in which her individual pang was the keener
in that it divided her from her son's. Alan had surprised her: she
had not foreseen that he would take a sentimental rebuff so hard.
His disappointment took the uncommunicative form of a sterner
application to work. He threw himself into the concerns of the
_Radiator_ with an aggressiveness that almost betrayed itself in the
paper. Mrs. Quentin never read the _Radiator_, but from the glimpses
of it reflected in the other journals she gathered that it was at
least not being subjected to the moral reconstruction which had been
one of Miss Fenno's alternatives.
Mrs. Quentin never spoke to her son of what had happened. She was
superior to the cheap satisfaction of avenging his injury by
depreciating its cause. She knew that in sentimental sorrows such
consolations are as salt in the wound. The avoidance of a subject so
vividly present to both could not but affect the closeness of their
relation. An invisible presence hampered their liberty of speech and
thought. The girl was always between them; and to hide the sense of
her intrusion they began to be less frequently together.
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