"George won't come down here," she said.
"George will do what I tell him."
Again Mrs. Pendyce shook her head, knowing by instinct that she was
right.
Mr. Pendyce stopped putting on his waist-coat.
"George had better take care," he said; "he's entirely dependent on me."
And as if with those words he had summed up the situation, the
philosophy of a system vital to his son, he no longer frowned. On
Mrs. Pendyce those words had a strange effect. They stirred within her
terror. It was like seeing her son's back bared to a lifted whip-lash;
like seeing the door shut against him on a snowy night. But besides
terror they stirred within her a more poignant feeling yet, as though
someone had dared to show a whip to herself, had dared to defy that
something more precious than life in her soul, that something which was
of her blood, so utterly and secretly passed by the centuries into
her fibre that no one had ever thought of defying it before. And there
flashed before her with ridiculous concreteness the thought: 'I've got
three hundred a year of my own!' Then the whole feeling left her, just
as in dreams a mordant sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache,
whose cause is forgotten, behind.
"There's the gong, Horace," she said. "Cecil Tharp is here to dinner.
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