And lighting a cigarette automatically I now approached her and stood nearer to her.
"I'm—s-sorry, Uncle Ranny," she faltered.
She had called me Randolph Byrd in her vehemence and the sound of it was still reverberating in my brain. But I was back to Uncle Ranny, like another Cinderella in her pumpkin.
"Do you know what you are, Alicia?" I stood over her, puffing and chattering against time, "You are an old-fashioned girl, that's what you are—with emotions and—and all sorts of curious traits, when you ought to be discussing Freud and complexes and the single standard and the right of woman—" the right of woman, I had almost said, to motherhood irrespective of marriage, upon which I had heard a fashionable young woman descant only that morning in the shop, apropos of a book she was buying on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. But I paused in time.
"And all sorts of things," I trailed off lamely.
"Yes," she murmured, a faint sad smile wavering on her lips. "I'll do that next time. I'll deliver a lecture to Jimmie some evening on the OEdipus complex—or why it's inadvisable to marry your own grandmother."
Clearly Alicia is no stranger to the patter of the time. But what a glorious, natural creature she is!
Her touch of satire after her tempest of emotion ravished me as perhaps nothing else. How adorable she was in all her moods!
"Do it now, Alicia," I cried.
"Now—I must go up and wash my face," she murmured. I couldn't bear to let her go.