Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

I had always known that Annabel was obstinate: but until that unhappy spring I had no idea how colossally obstinate she could be. Nothing that I said had the slightest effect upon her. She merely waited until I had finished speaking, and then said her own say over again, as if I had never spoken. Fay was quite right. If Annabel thought that a person ought to want a thing, she firmly believed that, therefore, they did want it: and nothing that the person or that any other person could urge to the contrary in any way shook her in this belief. I suppose I was like my sister in this respect. Fay said I was, and so I must have been. But I am sure that I made every effort to struggle against this narrow-mindedness, and I am equally sure that Annabel made no such effort at all. On the contrary, she gloried in it.

"It is nonsense to say that young people don't enjoy being taken abroad, Reggie," she declared over and over again: "absolute nonsense. It is only natural that the young should enjoy variety of place and scene."

"It may be natural, but it isn't true in this particular instance," I vainly argued: "I have told you till I'm sick of telling you that Fay doesn't want to go abroad just now: and if she doesn't want to go, she shan't go."

"I am sure you are making a mistake, Reggie, and that you will live to regret it."

"I have no doubt that I am. As a matter of fact I am always making mistakes and living to regret them. But that won't hinder me from making this one mistake more."

"She would enjoy it when once she got there: I know she would. I used to love travelling on the Continent when I was a girl."

"I dare say you did, but that has nothing to do with it. You and Fay are absolutely different people."

"Of course we are now, because I am so much older than she is: but when we were the same age, I expect Fay was very similar to me." And then I had it all over again about the normal desire of the young for variety of place and scene. I recognised the futility of argument. If Annabel believed that at any time or at any age she and Fay bore the slightest resemblance to one another, she could believe anything that she wished to believe: and she did.

Although my sister never shook me for a moment in my determination that Fay should have her own way, she never for a moment ceased trying to shake me; and I found it a most fatiguing process. Of late years we have heard much talk about "wars of attrition": that is the kind of war in which Annabel would have excelled.

There is a somewhat obscure passage in the Epistle of St. Jude about the Archangel Michael contending with the devil for the body of Moses. I don't in the least know what it means, but I know exactly what it felt like: and it felt like something very unpleasant indeed.