“Oh! of course! You would say that over your last crust! But it has been can’t with you, decidedly. I wonder if it was because you weren’t strong enough to have your own way!”
“That would be a bad way, surely.”
“Ah!—not yours!”
“And perhaps I have no way at all,” Lady Paton added, and Camelia was obliged to laugh at the subtle simplicity.
“That is being too submissive. Yet—it is comfortable, no doubt. Absolute non-resistance isn’t a bad idea. And yet, why shouldn’t one make one’s struggle?—survive if one is fittest? Why is not having one’s own way as good as submitting to somebody else’s? Oh dear!” she cried.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, nothing; I am unfittest, that is all!” Camelia stared out of the window.
“What do you mean, dear?”
“I mean that I can’t have my own way—I, too, can’t. And it wasn’t a bad way either. There is the cruelty of it, the irony, the jeer! All the bad ways are given to me, and when I turn from them, don’t want them, and try for the best—I don’t get it! Isn’t it intolerable?”
To Lady Paton this was wild, bewildering, pitiful, yet she grasped enough to say, “That would be the punishment, would it not, dear, for the bad ways?”