“Do, do give way and cry, dearie. It will be so much better for you. I know you’re wonderful, but you’ll suffer for it later on. You’re bound to.”
After that it had not needed Aunt Evelyn’s further observation that “poor little Lydia didn’t know what her loss meant” to dry Lydia’s perfunctory tears with the sting of an inflexible pride.
She would not cry again until they were prepared to concede to her the major right to affliction!
She did not love her mother very much. It is more common than is generally allowed, for an intelligent child, still in bondage to her natural instinct, reinforced by the tradition of allegiance to natural authorities, to couple that allegiance with a perfectly distinct antipathy to the personality of either or both parents. Lydia’s dislike of her mother’s sentimentality, her constant vacillation of purpose, and her incessant garrulity, was only unchildlike in her calm analysis of it, and in the conscious restraint that she put upon it.
Mrs. Raymond had often said, sometimes in Lydia’s hearing, that she would welcome death.
“But for little Lydia, I think I should have put an end to it all long ago. But how can I leave her, when she only has me?”
Mrs. Raymond, however, without any intervention of her own, when Lydia was twelve years old, reached the haven to which, since her husband’s death, she had so often aspired.
“I am an orphan.”
Lydia, already a dignified and self-contained little girl, bore herself with a new, pale composure.
It was for her that Aunt Evelyn, once more summoned from her shabby, untidy house at Wimbledon, was now hastily ordering mourning, and to whom the Wimbledon cousins had written brief, blotted letters of compassion and sympathy, and it was her future that Aunt Evelyn and Uncle George and Aunt Beryl had all been discussing under their breath whenever they thought she was not listening.