The expression on his mother’s face confronting the man she had once been married to, had sealed a resolution growing within him ever since she left him the night before.  It had put the finishing touch of reality.  To marry Fleur would be to hit his mother in the face; to betray his dead father!  It was no good!  Jon had the least resentful of natures.  He bore his parents no grudge in this hour of his distress.  For one so young there was a rather strange power in him of seeing things in some sort of proportion.  It was worse for Fleur, worse for his mother even, than it was for him.  Harder than to give up was to be given up, or to be the cause of some one you loved giving up for you.  He must not, would not behave grudgingly!  While he stood watching the tardy sunlight, he had again that sudden vision of the world which had come to him the night before.  Sea on sea, country on country, millions on millions of people, all with their own lives, energies, joys, griefs, and suffering—­all with things they had to give up, and separate struggles for existence.  Even though he might be willing to give up all else for the one thing he couldn’t have, he would be a fool to think his feelings mattered much in so vast a world, and to behave like a cry-baby or a cad.  He pictured the people who had nothing—­the millions who had given up life in the War, the millions whom the War had left with life and little else; the hungry children he had read of, the shattered men; people in prison, every kind of unfortunate.  And—­they did not help him much.  If one had to miss a meal, what comfort in the knowledge that many others had to miss it too?  There was more distraction in the thought of getting away out into this vast world of which he knew nothing yet.  He could not go on staying here, walled in and sheltered, with everything so slick and comfortable, and nothing to do but brood and think what might have been.  He could not go back to Wansdon, and the memories of Fleur.  If he saw her again he could not trust himself; and if he stayed here or went back there, he would surely see her.  While they were within reach of each other that must happen.  To go far away and quickly was the only thing to do.  But, however much he loved his mother, he did not want to go away with her.  Then feeling that was brutal, he made up his mind desperately to propose that they should go to Italy.  For two hours in that melancholy room he tried to master himself, then dressed solemnly for dinner.

His mother had done the same.  They ate little, at some length, and talked of his father’s catalogue.  The show was arranged for October, and beyond clerical detail there was nothing more to do.

After dinner she put on a cloak and they went out; walked a little, talked a little, till they were standing silent at last beneath the oak-tree.  Ruled by the thought:  ‘If I show anything, I show all,’ Jon put his arm through hers and said quite casually: