"They got on badly then—I mean afterward."
"What could you expect, my dear? It was just after the War, and, though she loved your father, she never in her heart of hearts forgave him his blue uniform. There was no reason in her—she was all one fluttering impulse, and to live peaceably in this world one must have at least a grain of leaven in the lump of one's emotion." He chuckled as he ended and fixed his mild gaze upon the lamp. Being very old, he had come to realise that of the two masks possible to the world's stage, the comic, even if the less spectacular, is also the less commonplace.
"So she died of an overdose of medicine," said Laura; "I have never been told and yet I have always known that she died by her own hand. Something in my blood has taught me."
Uncle Percival shook his head. "No—no, she only made a change," he corrected. "She was a little white moth who drifted to another sphere—because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her."
"She wanted what?" demanded Laura, her eyes glowing.
The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful curiosity which belongs to age. "At the moment you remind me of her," he returned, "and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak."
"What did she want? What did she want?" persisted Laura.
"Well, first of all she wanted your father—every minute of him, every thought, every heart-beat. He couldn't give it to her, my dear. No man could. I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the love she wanted. Women seem to be born with a kind of divination—a second sight where love is concerned—they aren't content with the mere husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get—"
"But my father?" protested Laura; "he broke his heart for her."
A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man's sunken lips. "He gave to her dead what she had never had from him living," he returned. "When she was gone everything—even the man's life for which he had sacrificed her—turned worthless. He always had the seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to develop."