“You mustn’t, Emily. Tell me about the winter. Have you been gay?”
“Gay?” Emily wheeled from the desk. She gazed at Alexina almost wildly. Then she laughed again. “Gay! oh, my great Heaven—gay! Then you don’t know? I am going to bear him a child—and, oh, help me somehow; Alexina, I loathe him.”
A child, Uncle Austen and Emily a child! A warmth swept out of Alexina’s very soul and enveloped her. She knew, and she did not know. Other women and girls had taken it for granted always that she knew, and talked on before her. It meant to her something vague, unapproachable, veiled, and a great, overwhelming consciousness stifled and choked her.
“I went out on the platform of the train while we were away,” Emily was saying, Emily who never, even in childhood, had curbed a mood, a dislike, a humour, “and tried to throw myself off, but I was afraid.”
Alexina shrank. “I mustn’t listen—you mustn’t tell me—it’s between you and him, Emily.”
Emily had gotten up and was walking about.
“He offered Oliver a place in the bank, to please me, I thought. Oliver’s nineteen now. The place had been paying eighteen dollars a week, and Oliver had only been making twelve. So he offered it to him at fifteen. ‘To the benefiting of both sides,’ he came home and told me.”
Emily stood still, her eyes tearless and hard. “Put on your wraps, Alexina, and we’ll go drive. It’s like a duty, a task, the exercising of the horses. It hangs over me like a nightmare that I’ve got it to do, until I’ve gone out and gotten it over.”
“Yes,” said Alexina, on familiar ground, “I know. I’ve hated those horses too, before you. But you ought to be like Aunt Harriet, Emily; don’t be like me—tell him so.”
Emily, unlocking the wardrobe door, suddenly flung up her arms against it and hid her face in them. “I’ve tried, I have tried, and I can’t—I can’t; I’m afraid of him, Alexina.”