He took out his handkerchief and dried her eyes. He smiled in a way that she had never seen him smile before. Once more she threw her arms round his neck.
“We’ll have such a lark, father dear. You don’t know what fun we’re going to have together.”
“You haven’t forgotten that you’re going to have a baby.”
“I’m glad she’ll be born out there within sound of the sea and under a wide blue sky.”
“Have you already made up your mind about the sex?” he murmured, with his thin, dry smile.
“I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I’m going to bring up my daughter so that she’s free and can stand on her own feet. I’m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he’s willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.”
She felt her father stiffen. He had never spoken of such things and it shocked him to hear these words in his daughter’s mouth.
“Let me be frank just this once, father. I’ve been foolish and wicked and hateful. I’ve been terribly punished. I’m determined to save my daughter from all that. I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life like a free man and make a better job of it than I have.”
“Why, my love, you talk as though you were fifty. You’ve got all your life before you. You mustn’t be downhearted.”
Kitty shook her head and slowly smiled.
“I’m not. I have hope and courage. The past is finished; let the dead bury their dead. It’s all uncertain, life and whatever is to come to me, but I enter upon it with a light and buoyant heart. It’s all confused, but vaguely I discern a pattern, and I see before me an inexhaustible richness, the mystery and the strangeness of everything, compassion and charity, the Way and the Wayfarer, and perhaps in the end—God.”
Endnotes
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In keeping with tradition set by later editions, in this Standard Ebooks edition “Tching-Yen” has been reverted to “Hong Kong,” but “Fane” remains. —S.E. Editor ↩
Colophon
The Painted Veil
was published in by
W. Somerset Maugham.
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