“Certainly,” said Claire, her lips compressed, her spirit descended into fathomless depths of depression. But Christopher, the sturdy and, to be honest, rather stupid Christopher, has no clue to Claire’s mercurial sensitiveness. When she is most profoundly wounded by his matter-of-factness, Christopher regards her pregnant silence and her tragic eyes as an all too common phenomenon which he describes as “Old Claire being a bit put out about something or other.”
“Mary’s children have grown up, you know,” I said to Christopher. “Martyn is twenty-one, and Sallie is now a medical student. She wants to specialize, eventually, as a psycho-analyst.”
“Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded.
“Very.”
Claire did not look delighted.
“I’m not so sure, Miles, that Sallie is really very clever. She’s sharp, in a way, and of course she thinks herself tremendously clever, but all that talk, and the opinionative way in which she lays down the law, doesn’t impress me very much. Sallie and Martyn are both crude in many ways.”
“But is Sallie really going to be a lady doctor?”
“So she thinks at present,” replied Claire, with a tolerant smile that I think relieved her feelings. “Girls have these wonderful opportunities nowadays. I’ve sometimes thought that if it had been possible, I ought to have gone in for that kind of career myself. I believe I’ve got a natural turn for that sort of thing.”
Claire almost always believes herself to possess a “natural turn,” whatever that phrase may denote, for any form of achievement in which she hears of someone else’s success. I am prepared to agree with her, within limits, but when it comes to science, I can only preserve an indiscreet silence.
Claire, pathetically dependent on the appreciation of other people, fathomed its meaning all too easily.