My husband blew his nose, with a “Bless the little girl! I could find it in my heart to wish it might always be so with her. But what is your notion? I can see you have got to the bottom of the little mystery. Trust you women for seeing through a stone wall.”
“Each attack of what we have called ‘poorliness’ has been a fit of sullenness, lasting sometimes for days, sometimes for more than a week, and passing off as suddenly as it came.”
My dear husband’s face clouded with serious displeasure; never before had it worn such an expression for me. I had a sense of separation from him, as if we two, who had so long been one, were two once more.
“This is an extraordinary charge for a mother to bring against her child. How have you come to this conclusion?”
Already was my husband become my judge. He did not see that I was ill, agitated, still standing, and hardly able to keep my feet. And there was worse to come: how was I to go through with it?
“What causes for resentment can Dorothy conceivably have?” he repeated, in the same cold judicial tone.
“It is possible to feel resentment, it is possible to nurse resentment, to let it hang as a heavy cloud-curtain between you and all you love the best, without any adequate cause, without any cause that you can see yourself when the fit is over!”
My voice sounded strange and distant in my own ears: I held by the back of a chair to steady myself: but I was not fainting: I was acutely alive to all that was passing in my husband’s mind. He looked at me curiously, inquisitively, but not as if I belonged to him, and were part and parcel of his life.
“You seem to be curiously familiar with a state of feeling which I should have judged to be the last a Christian lady would know anything about.”
“Oh, my husband, don’t you see? You are killing me. I am not going through this anguish for nothing. I do know what it is. And if Dorothy, my poor child, suffers, it is all my fault! There is nothing bad in her but what she has got from me.”