ld not hurt them
so much as the truth would certainly do. The thought of their faces,
and particularly of her aunt's, as it would meet the fact--disconcerted,
unfriendly, condemning, pained--occurred to her again and again.

"Oh! I wish," she said, "that people thought alike about these things."

Capes watched the limpid water dripping from his oar. "I wish they did,"
he said, "but they don't."

"I feel--All this is the rightest of all conceivable things. I want to
tell every one. I want to boast myself."

"I know."

"I told them a lie. I told them lies. I wrote three letters yesterday
and tore them up. It was so hopeless to put it to them. At last--I told
a story."

"You didn't tell them our position?"

"I implied we had married."

"They'll find out. They'll know."

"Not yet."

"Sooner or later."

"Possibly--bit by bit.... But it was hopelessly hard to put. I said
I knew he disliked and distrusted you and your work--that you shared
all Russell's opinions: he hates Russell beyond measure--and that we
couldn't possibly face a conventional marriage. What else could one say?
I left him to suppose--a registry perhaps...."

Capes let his oar smack on the water.

"Do you mind very much?"

He shook his head.

"But it makes me feel inhuman," he added.

"And me...."

"It's the perpetual trouble," he said, "of parent and child. They
can't help seeing things in the way they do. Nor can we. WE don't
think they're right, but they don't think we are. A deadlock. In a very
definite sense we are in the wrong--hopelessly in the wrong. But--It's
just this: who was to be hurt?"

"I wish no one had to be hurt," said Ann Veronica. "When one is happy--I
don't like to think of them. Last time I left home I felt as hard as
nails. But this is all different. It is different."

"There's a sort of instinct of rebellion," said Capes. "It isn't
anything to do with our times particularly. People think it is, but they
are wrong. It's to do with adolescence. Long before religion and Society
heard of Doubt, girls were all for midnight coaches and Gretna Green.
It's a sort of home-leaving instinct."

He followed up a line of thought.

"There's another instinct, too," he went on, "in a state of suppression,
unless I'm very much mistaken; a child-expelling instinct.... I
wonder.... There's no family uniting instinct, anyhow; it's habit
and sentiment and material convenience hold families together after
adolescence. There's alw