“Yes, my dear: I see it all. You hate Andreas.”
“Who would not? The mean-souled, cringing wretch!”
“And Taddeus?-you hate Taddeus, Sophia.”
Sophia was some time before she answered; but, as Lenore continued to look steadily in her face, she at length said, in a low voice,
“Mother, I loathe him. When he is away, I can turn my thoughts from it: but when I am with him,—that limp of his,—his voice,—they make my heart sick.”
“Grief made your heart sick, my child; and you cannot separate that grief from the sight of your brother’s lameness, or from the voice which told you the tidings. These things are not Taddeus: though, alas! he suffers from your hatred as if they were. But, Sophia, how is this wounded spirit of yours to be healed?”
“O! let nobody think of healing it, mother. I am happier as it is. I am happier than you. You rise with swollen eyes when I have been sleeping. Your countenance falls when you hear me laugh; and you are altered, mother, very much altered of late. It would be better for you to be as calm as I am.”
“And for your father? Would it be better for all if each grew indifferent? The easiest way then would be to live each in a cave alone, like wild beasts.”
“Much the easiest,” exclaimed Sophia, drawing a long breath, as if impatient of confinement beneath a roof. “I am so tired of the whole domestic apparatus,—the watching and waiting upon one another, and coaxing and comforting, when we all know there can be no comfort; the——”
“I know no such thing. There is comfort, and I feel it. But I will not speak to you of it now, my dear, because I know you cannot enter into it.”