He is uneasily, gratefully, and resentfully fond of his sister when he is away from her, and it is, I think, always on his conscience that he never quite manages to read the whole of the immensely long and rather illegible letters that she writes him—but when they are together Claire makes Christopher feel self-conscious and inadequate.
I am sorry for Claire. She spends her life and her strength in making the wrong demands on the wrong people. In middle life she still retains all the passionate desire of youth to be wholly understood. It has never yet occurred to her that, in the majority of human relationships, it is still more desirable not to be wholly understood.
When Christopher comes home on leave, she is as frightfully and pathetically excited as though he were not one of the most real and poignant disappointments of her life.
And yet, her bitter resentment of Christopher’s emotional inadequacy occupies her mind for hours and hours, and days and nights, and fills pages of her diaries, and reams of her notepaper, besides forming a sort of standing item in the list of miseries with which it is her nightly habit to keep herself awake.
(Like all neurasthenics, Claire is always complaining of sleepless nights).
Christopher, having spent part of each of his previous furloughs with us, is always looked upon as belonging to Cross Loman, and the welcome accorded to Captain Patch was of course extended also to him by the whole neighborhood.
It was I who suggested, tactlessly enough, that Mary and her children should come up to dinner on the evening after Christopher’s arrival.
Claire’s enormous dark eyes were turned upon me with tragic reproachfulness.
“His second evening with me? They can come next week, if they like.”
Unfortunately, before the close of his first evening with us Christopher said: “Why didn’t you have Mary and the two kids here? Let’s walk down and see them after dinner.”