Again there was silence. This time she was triumphant.
Then at length her father lifted his head. His face was abstracted, he seemed to be abstracting himself, to make a pure statement.
“Well, you’re not going all that distance away,” he said. “I’ll ask Mr. Burt about a place here. I’m not going to have you by yourself at the other side of London.”
“But I’ve got to go to Kingston,” said Ursula. “They’ve sent for me.”
“They’ll do without you,” he said.
There was a trembling silence when she was on the point of tears.
“Well,” she said, low and tense, “you can put me off this, but I’m going to have a place. I’m not going to stop at home.”
“Nobody wants you to stop at home,” he suddenly shouted, going livid with rage.
She said no more. Her nature had gone hard and smiling in its own arrogance, in its own antagonistic indifference to the rest of them. This was the state in which he wanted to kill her. She went singing into the parlour.
“C’est la mère Michel qui a perdu son chat,
Qui cri par la fenêtre qu’est-ce qui le lui renda——”