you
so?_" If there was guilt, he shared the guilt. If there was shame, he
was shameful. Others after him had sinned against her casually, counting
their behavior no more than a speck of dust in the garbage of human
emotion with which she was already smirched. He may not have seduced
her, but he had sinned against her, because while loving her he had let
her soul elude him. He had made her love him. He had trifled with her
sensuousness, and to say that he was too young for blame was cowardly.
It was that very youth which was the sin, because under society's laws,
whatever fine figure his love might seem to him to have cut, he should
have known that it was a profitless love for a girl. He shared in the
guilt. He partook of the shame. That was incontrovertible.

Suddenly a new aspect of the situation was painfully visible. Had not
his own mother been sinned against by his father? That seemed equally
incontrovertible. Prescott had known it in his heart. Prescott had said
to him in the Albany on the night he killed himself that he wanted to
marry Stella in order to be given the right to protect her. Prescott
must always have deplored the position in which his friend's mistress
had been placed. That was a hard word to use for one's mother. It seemed
to hiss with scorn. No doubt his father would have married her, if Lady
Saxby had divorced him. No doubt that was the salve with which he had
soothed his conscience. Something was miserably wrong with our rigid
divorce law, he may have said. He must have cursed it innumerable times
in order to console his conscience, just as himself at eighteen had
cursed youth when he could not marry Lily. His mother had been sinned
against. Nothing could really alter that. It was useless to say that the
sinner had in the circumstances behaved very well, that so far as he was
able he had treated her honorably. But nothing could excuse his father's
initial weakness. The devotion of a lifetime could not wash out his
deliberate sin against--and who was she? Who was his mother? Valerie ...
and her father was at Trinity, Cambridge ... a clergyman ... a
gentleman. And his father had taken her away, had exposed her to the
calumny of the world. He had afterward behaved chivalrously at any rate
by the standards of romance. But by what small margin had his own mother
escaped the doom of Lily? All his conceptions of order and safety and
custom tottered and reeled at such a thought. Surely such a realization