Mrs. Solent rose to her feet, her face pale now and hard-set as flint.

“You’d have done better to have gone back to Blacksod this afternoon, Wolf,” she said, “if that’s how you feel about me!”

“Mother, you are absolutely unfair!” he cried. “And you’ve always been unfair about Gerda. You hate her for some unknown absurd reason. Pure snobbishness most likely! And you’d like to hurt her, to make her suffer, to spoil her life. That’s why⁠—oh, I see it now!⁠—you’re so glad I’m fussed up about Mattie. You think that will spoil everything for Gerda; and you are glad that it should!”

She came again round the table now, but with a very different purpose from her previous gesture; and yet, as Wolf knew well, it was the same savage eroticism that dominated both these movements.