You're crying!" she had said and she had broken down too and for a few seconds they had cried together rocking in each other's arms, while the rain streamed down the window panes and beautifully shut them in, since there are few places more enclosing than the little, dingy private parlour of a remote English inn on a ceaselessly rainy day.
It had all come back before he reached the house in Kensington whose windows looked into the thick leaves of the plane trees.

And at the same time he knew that the burning anger which kept rising in him was perhaps undue and not quite fair.

But he was thinking it had _not_ been mere cruel chance--it could have been helped--it need never have been! It had been the narrow cold hard planning of grown-up people who knew that they were powerful enough to enforce any hideous cruelty on creatures who had no defence.

He actually found his heated mind making a statement of the case as wild as this and its very mercilessness of phrase checked him.

The grown-up person had been his mother--his long-beloved--and he was absolutely calling her names.