Mrs. Bradley always saw whatever of truth there was to be seen in other people’s positions. She felt no impatience or grievance against her merciless daughter. She had not time for such reactions. Her own work occupied all her time. And she hoped for her children that they, too, would find work that would thus become the meaning of their lives. It was wonderful in her, this detachment, Alix thought, yet she found fault with it, and it was the only fault she found in Mrs. Bradley. She should have felt herself more responsible for the uncouthness of her daughter; she should have given less thought to the welfare of the London children, and more to the manners of her own. “It would have been better for them,” thought Alix, “if she could have become very angry with them. How excellent for Ruth and Rosemary if they could have been well whipped from time to time. And it is too late now.”
Mrs. Bradley would have thought whipping irrational and cruel. “She is too wise, too quiet,” thought Alix. “But then the saints were like that; wise and quiet and incapable of anger.”
Alix had never cared at all about the saints, and it was strange to feel that this heretic lady, creedless and uncloistered, made them more real and more lovable to her.
“Do you not think so, too, Giles?” she said to her friend in the study. “Do you not see what I mean? She is like a modern kind of saint; so selfless and dedicated and laborious. She never thinks about being happy.”
“You make her happy, Alix. Did you know that?” said Giles.—“Yes, I see perfectly what you mean. Yet Mummy never seems to me sad. Does she to you?”
“I do not know,” Alix reflected. “She did not begin so quiet, I am sure. Just as the saints did not. At the bottom of her heart she wanted to be loved more; much more;—isn’t that what all people want most, Giles?—And then when she found that she was not to be she must have felt very sad.”
“But, I say, you know!”—Giles stared at her from his chair. “You do say the most astonishing things! Not loved enough! Why don’t we all love her!”
“Oh, but it would have to be more than that. She would want far more love than English children could ever give to their parents.”
“English children! Surely you don’t think that the French love their parents more than we do!”
“But of course we do, Giles,” said Alix in candid surprise. “Our mothers we do; for perhaps fathers do not count for so much with us, either.”