Bettina wanted to go!
My mother, unwisely I felt, reminded Betty of the old pledge.
"I was a baby then. What did I know?"
And now there were tears in Bettina's eyes because she was not going to leave her mother.
I don't like to think of those next days. They were all a strain and a tangle.
I cannot imagine what we should have done without Eric. For the way Bettina took her disappointment made my mother positively ill. Eric's prescription was hard to fill: "Peace of mind—absolute quiet and tranquillity."
"You are less alarmed," he said in that direct way of his, "than you were that first day you brought me here. But you have more reason."
I did not want Bettina fully to realise the cloud that was so surely gathering to burst—and yet I was angry at her failure to realise. So unreasonable, so unkind I found I could be! Oh, I lost patience more than once. But my mother, never.