“No!” she said. “I’ll wait!”
This was her first rebuke and she felt it a most unmerited one. It was the first time she had ever heard of a fixed, arbitrary bed hour for adult people. It had occurred to her a natural thing to go to bed when you were sleepy. Sometimes at home, the day after a dance, she had gone to bed directly after dinner, with a book to divert the few waking minutes, and at other times she had sat up almost till morning reading or finishing some enthralling bit of sewing. She felt a great anger toward Gilbert, with his half-hearted protest. There he sat reading his silly paper, page by page, every word ... what did he expect her to do?
The old lady glanced up suddenly.
“Come, child!” she said. “Don’t sit there and brood! Gilbert, get her the ‘Pigs in Clover’!”
“She won’t like it,” he answered, deep in his paper.
“Rubbish! It’s something to pass the time and that’s all the young folks care for in these days. Get it for her!”
So from inside the secretaire Gilbert brought out a round box with a glass cover inside which were marbles to be rolled through certain partitioned alleys, and finally, if one were skilful, into a sort of little house. He kissed Claudine as he gave it to her, an apologetic, almost a guilty kiss, but she had no smile for him. She sat with the thing in her hands, twisting it this way and that, letting the little balls roll as they would through the alleys, and ready at the least word, the least gesture, to burst into outrageous and most bitter laughter.
One of the marbles suddenly rolled into the pen, and, unaccountably, with this feeble satisfaction, the storm within her subsided. She remembered having read somewhere that lunatics were given games and diversions like this to quiet them. She wished that she could tell that to her father ... she wished that her father could see her, rolling marbles about in a glass-covered box.
Gilbert was gently shaking her.
“Sleepy-head!” he said. “It’s after eleven! You’ve been dozing!”