I then informed my sister that I had planned to take a walk and regretted that I could not escort her. She looked at me in astonishment, such astonishment that I can still see the surprise in her limpid eyes.
“What, you are not going to mass, Francis? There is only one.”
“No,” I replied with my most assured manner.
“It isn’t possible!”
Her eyes, those limpid eyes, at once filled with tears, and I remembered the first mass that I had missed. Pride forbade me to yield, pride and also that new, vague belief which my imagination had built up. Louise pushed Nicola and Jamie before her, and turned to me, her book of hours in her hand, still hoping to move me.
“I beg you, come with us.”
If she had added, “to please me,” perhaps I would have yielded, so alarmed did she appear. She no doubt would have deemed that plea unworthy of its purpose. This time I refused still more emphatically.
“I shall be obliged to write to mamma,” she urged as a last argument.
“As you please.”
She did not, however, carry out her threat. Her sense of delicacy warned her not to add to our parents’ anxieties in the midst of their battle with the pestilence. On the contrary, she doubled her attention to me, trying to win me to her, to gain my friendship, my confidence. With innate art she became an improvised mother of the family, ever trying to bring us together, to group us, warring against the isolation in which I delighted.