“It’s all right,” I started to say. But her head suddenly went down between her hunched-up shoulders. Her body began to shake and tears gushed from her eyes. I had to help her to the car steps.
“It was all my fault,” she said in a strangled voice, between her helpless little sobs.
It was brave of her, of course, and she meant it for the best. But I wish she hadn’t said it. Instead of making everything easier for me, as she intended, she only made it harder. She left me disturbingly conscious of ghostly heroisms which transposed what I had tried to regard as essentially ignoble into some higher and purer key. And she made it harder for me to look at my husband, when I got home, with a calm and collected eye. I felt suspiciously like Lady Macbeth after the second murder. I felt that we were fellow-sharers of a guilty secret 17 it would never do to drag too often into the light of every-day life.
But it will no more stay under cover, I find, than a dab-chick will stay under water. It bobs up in the most unexpected places, as it did last night, when Dinkie publicly proclaimed that he was going to marry his Mummy when he got big.
“It would be well, my son, not to repeat the mistakes of your father!” observed Dinky-Dunk. And having said it, he relighted his quarantining pipe and refused to meet my eye. But it didn’t take a surgical operation to get what he meant into my head. It hurt, in more ways than one, for it struck me as suspiciously like a stone embodied in a snowball—and even our offspring recognized this as no fair manner of fighting.
“Then it impresses you as a mistake?” I demanded, seeing red, for the coyote in me, I’m afraid, will never entirely become house-dog.
“Isn’t that the way you regard it?” he asked, inspecting me with a non-committal eye.
I had to bite my lip, to keep from flinging out at him the things that were huddled back in my heart. But it was no time for making big war medicine. So I got the lid on, and held it there. 18
“My dear Dinky-Dunk,” I said with an effort at a gesture of weariness, “I’ve long since learned that life can’t be made clean, like a cat’s body, by the use of the tongue alone!”
Dinky-Dunk did not look at me. Instead, he turned to the boy who was watching that scene with a small frown of perplexity on his none too approving face.