The very fact that he was justified had roused the foolish remnant of my pride.
I had loved my mother; I had reverenced my father; though my brothers were indifferent to me, I had felt a genuine tenderness for my sisters. But since that night on Jerry’s steps it had been to me as if I had put myself on one side of a flood and left them on the other, and that there was no magic skiff that would carry me back whence I came. I cannot say that I grieved for them; and it was the last of my thoughts that they would grieve for me. I accepted the condition that we were dead to each other, and tried to bury memory.
And now came this first stirring of resurrection. It hurt me. I didn’t want it. It was like the return of life to a frozen limb. Numbness was preferable to anguish.
“Lovey,” I said, as the old man hung about me when I was undressing that night, “how would you feel if one of your daughters—”
He raised himself from the task of pulling off my boots, which to humor him I allowed him to perform, and looked at me in terror.
“They ain’t—they ain’t after me?”
“No, no! But suppose they were—wouldn’t you like to see them?”
He dropped the boot he held in his hand.
“Y’ain’t goin’ to ’ave them ’unted up for me, Slim?”
“I don’t know anything about them, Lovey. That isn’t my point at all. But suppose—just suppose—you could see them again; would you do it?”