Then, gradually, into his self-engrossment there penetrated a conviction
that all was not well between his father and his mother. He had always
taken them for granted much as he did the house and the servants. In his
brief vacations during his college days they had agreed or disagreed,
amicably enough. He had considered, in those days, that life was a
very simple thing. People married and lived together. Marriage, he
considered, was rather the end of things.

But he was older now, and he knew that marriage was a beginning and not
an end. It did not change people fundamentally. It only changed their
habits.

His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was
the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that they
differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common ground at
all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did not put it that
way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness, lost desires, and
the wreckage of years of dissension.

It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties, but
he wondered some times if all of life was either looking forward or
looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who
still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the
mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the
women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent.