“Get oft’ with you,” said Anne impolitely. “I can tackle Ada with one hand tied behind my back.”
“Of course,” Sam agreed, “you could, but you are not going to. Ada’s my job.”
“I can be pig-headed as well as you, my lad,” Anne menaced him.
“It’s not that, mother.”
“No, it isn’t that,” said Effie, conceiving perhaps that it was time for her to enter into this tragicomedy of rivalry in self-surrender. “Sam’s right. Ada does matter, and it is I who am the failure, I who have broken faith, I who was arrogant. I thought that I could bear a torch, and I can only bear a child. But I know now what I have to do. I can go away. I can disappear.”
It seemed to Anne that this was serious because obviously it was a way out; but she thought it a way much more appalling in prospect than the plan she had proposed for herself of “taking Ada on.” She took alarm. In another than Effie it might have been heroics, but Effie’s was not the stuff that mouths bravado. Anne granted that, and saw a tragic chasm yawn She signalled her alarm to Sam, who answered it with a glance which made appeal to her, whilst yielding nothing of his obstinacy.
“If you go away,” he said, “my mother goes with you. I’ve meant that from the first.”
Anne nodded without enthusiasm. Certainly that was a solution and equally not the solution. It gave Sam to Ada, and Effie, it appeared, was not seeing it as a solution at all. There were strange possibilities, Anne thought, in this young woman, and she did not want them to be tested too far. Effie was not a talker, and when she said a thing she did not overstate. There was danger. Well, Anne was forewarned, and addressed herself in her most humorous, common-sense manner to laugh it out of court. One can deal with danger in worse ways than to apply to it the acid—ridicule.
She put her arms akimbo and surveyed Effie and Sam appraisingly. “I dunno,” she said, “that there’s a pin to choose between the three of us for chuckle-headed foolishness. We’re all fancying ourselves as hard as we can for martyrs and arranging Ada’s life for her. It hasn’t struck any of us yet that Ada’s likely to arrange things for herself.”
And if Sam’s impulse was to say gloomily: “It isn’t likely at all,” he repressed it when Anne’s eye caught his, and said instead, “That’s so,” without knowing why he said it and without believing it.