“A dream,” I used to say, “a dream indeed—but a dream that is one step nearer awakening than that nightmare of the former days.”
She found great comfort and assurance in my altered clothes—she liked the new fashions of dress, she alleged. It was not simply altered clothes. I did grow two inches, broaden some inches round my chest, and increase in weight three stones before I was twenty-three. I wore a soft brown cloth and she would caress my sleeve and admire it greatly—she had the woman’s sense of texture very strong in her.
Sometimes she would muse upon the past, rubbing together her poor rough hands—they never got softened—one over the other. She told me much I had not heard before about my father, and her own early life. It was like finding flat and faded flowers in a book still faintly sweet, to realize that once my mother had been loved with passion; that my remote father had once shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms. And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness, of Nettie.
“She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to guess the person she intended.
“No man is worthy of a woman’s love,” I answered. “No woman is worthy of a man’s. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.”
“There’s others,” she would muse.
“Not for me,” I said. “No! I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burnt my magazine. I can’t begin again, mother, not from the beginning.”
She sighed and said no more then.
At another time she said—I think her words were: “You’ll be lonely when I’m gone dear.”
“You’ll not think of going, then,” I said.