For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if speaking to himself, “I can’t imagine what has happened to you.”
“Nothing,” said Olivia. “Nothing. I am the same as I have always been, only tonight I have come to the end of saying ‘yes, yes’ to everything, of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our dream … believing always that we are superior to everyone else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because … oh, there is no use in talking. … I am just the same as I have always been, only tonight I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here … a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what will we do? What will you do … and Aunt Cassie and all the rest?”
In her excitement her cheeks grew flushed and she stood up, very tall and beautiful, leaning against the mantelpiece; but her husband did not notice her. He appeared to be lost in deep thought, his face contorted with a kind of grim concentration.
“I know what has happened,” he said presently. “It is Sabine. She should never have come back here. She was like that always … stirring up trouble … even as a little girl. She used to break up our games by saying: ‘I won’t play house. Who can be so foolish as to pretend muddy water is claret! It’s a silly game.’ ”
“Do you mean that she is saying it again now … that it’s a silly game to pretend muddy water is claret?”
He turned away without answering and began again to pace up and down over the enormous faded roses of the old Victorian carpet. “I don’t know what you’re driving at. All I know is that Sabine … Sabine … is an evil woman.”
“Do you hate Sabine because she is a friend of mine?”
She had watched him for so many years disliking the people who were her friends, managing somehow to get rid of them, to keep her from seeing them, to force her into those endless dinners at the houses of the safe men he knew, the men who had gone to his college and belonged to his club, the men who would never do anything that was unexpected. And in the end she had always done as he wanted her to do. It was perhaps a manifestation of his resentment toward all those whom he could not understand and even (she thought) feared a little—the attitude of a man who will not allow others to enjoy what he could not take for himself. It was the first time she had ever spoken of this dog-in-the-manger game, but she found herself unable to keep silent. It was as if some power outside her had taken possession of her body. She had a strange sensation of shame at the very moment she spoke, of shame at the sound of her own voice, a little strained and hysterical.
There was something preposterous, too, in the sight of Anson prancing up and down the old room filled with all the souvenirs of that decayed respectability in which he wrapped himself … prancing up and down with all his prejudices and superstitions bristling. And now Olivia had dragged the truth uncomfortably into the light.
“What an absurd thing to say!” he said bitterly.
Olivia sighed. “No, I don’t think so. … I think you know exactly what I mean.” (She knew the family game of pretending never to understand a truthful, unpleasant statement.)
But this, too, he refused to answer. Instead, he turned to her more savage and excited than she had ever seen him, so moved that he seemed for a second to attain a pale flash of power and dignity. “And I don’t like that Fiji Islander of a daughter of hers, who has been dragged all over the world and had her head filled with barbaric ideas.”
At the sight of him and the sound of his voice Olivia experienced a sudden blinding flash of intuition that illuminated the whole train of their conversation, indeed, the whole procession of the years she had spent here at Pentlands or in the huge brownstone house in Beacon Street. She knew suddenly what it was that frightened Anson and Aunt Cassie and all that intricate world of family. They were terrified lest the walls, the very foundations, of their existence be swept away leaving them helpless with all their little prides and vanities exposed, stripped of all the laws and prejudices which they had made to protect them. It was why they hated O’Hara, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. He had menaced their security. To be exposed thus would be a calamity, for in any other world save their own, in a world where they stood unprotected by all that money laid away in solid trust funds, they would have no existence whatever. They would suddenly be what they really were.
She saw sharply, clearly, for the first time, and she said quietly, “I think you dislike Thérèse for reasons that are not fair to the girl. You distrust her because she is different from all the others … from the sort of girls that you were trained to believe perfect. Heaven knows there are enough of them about here … girls as like as peas in a pod.”
“And what about this boy who is coming to stay with Sabine and her daughter … this American boy with a French name who has never seen his own country until now? I suppose he’ll be as queer as all the others. Who knows anything
