The child looked at him dumbly. Already her heart was heavy because of her own disappointment. Her mouth was dumb and pathetic. But he did not notice, he went his way.
And she played on, because of her disappointment persisting even the more in her play. She dreaded work, because she could not do it as he did it. She was conscious of the great breach between them. She knew she had no power. The grown-up power to work deliberately was a mystery to her.
He would smash into her sensitive child’s world destructively. Her mother was lenient, careless. The children played about as they would all day. Ursula was thoughtless—why should she remember things? If across the garden she saw the hedge had budded, and if she wanted these greeny-pink, tiny buds for bread-and-cheese, to play at teaparty with, over she went for them.
Then suddenly, perhaps the next day, her soul would almost start out of her body as her father turned on her, shouting:
“Who’s been tramplin’ an’ dancin’ across where I’ve just sowed seed? I know it’s you, nuisance! Can you find nowhere else to walk, but just over my seed beds? But it’s like you, that is—no heed but to follow your own greedy nose.”
It had shocked him in his intent world to see the zigzagging lines of deep little foot-prints across his work. The child was infinitely more shocked. Her vulnerable little soul was flayed and trampled. Why were the foot-prints there? She had not wanted to make them. She stood dazzled with pain and shame and unreality.
Her soul, her consciousness seemed to die away. She became shut off and senseless, a little fixed creature whose soul had gone hard and unresponsive. The sense of her own unreality hardened her like a frost. She cared no longer.
And the sight of her face, shut and superior with self-asserting indifference, made a flame of rage go over him. He wanted to break her.
“I’ll break your obstinate little face,” he said, through shut teeth, lifting his hand.
The child did not alter in the least. The look of indifference, complete glancing indifference, as if nothing but herself existed to her, remained fixed.