"Do you remember once telling me about Mr. Brun's Tiger? I've often thought of it since and it seems to me now that to all of us—for Roddy and Francis and Lizzie and me—the moment of our consciousness came. Ever since that day when they carried Roddy back to Seddon each one of us has had to wait, just holding ourselves in.... But, you know, Dr. Chris, that's the secret of the whole matter. It wasn't I, or Breton, or even Lizzie or Roddy that defeated grandmother—it was simply Real Life. First the War, then Roddy's accident—Roddy's accident most of all. We had, all five of us, been leading sham lives, then suddenly God, Fate, Providence, what you will, steps in, jerks us all back, takes away from all of us what we thought we wanted most, puts us in line with the real thing—our Tiger, if you like. Grandmother simply couldn't stand it. Lizzie and Roddy are real—half of Breton and me, and most of grandmother unreal—Well, Lizzie and Roddy have just put things straight quietly.... Grandmother's generation saw things 'through a glass darkly'—They're gone. It's all going to be 'face to face' now."
Christopher looked at her, smiling. She was so young, so adorably young with her seriousness.
She broke in—"What rot I'm talking! It only comes to this, that I wish now, like anything, that I'd been nicer to grandmamma. One sees things always too late.... I'd like to have another try, to begin with grandmamma again, to be more tolerant, to hate her less. But I expect in the end it would be the same. She'd have had me tied up, without a will of my own, without a word to say!... that was her idea of controlling us all. It's over, it's done with—no one, I expect, will have her kind of power again.... But she was fine! I only see now how fine she was!
"No one, I expect, will have her kind of power again...."
Now she stood away from Christopher, looking at him and also beyond him, as though she were finally, once and for all, surveying, cataloguing that same power—
"She wasn't terrible, she wasn't fine, she wasn't really anything except a kind of peg for all sorts of traditions to hang on to. In herself she was just a plucky, theatrical, obstinate old woman. It was simply the idea of her that frightened us all. I remember the first time that I saw Yale Ross's picture of her—He'd caught all the ceremony and the terror. It was then that I had the first faint suspicion that she didn't, in herself, live up to the picture in the least.
"I suppose," she went on, coming up closer to him, "that that's why no one will ever be like her again—because no one will ever be taken in so completely by shams again, never by the empty shell of anything. But that's just how she influenced us—all of us. Myself, you, Lizzie, Roddy, Francis ... we were all mixed up in it—
"And then the first moment that we really came into contact with her she wasn't anything—wasn't simply there. Do you know, Dr. Chris, seeing her now, just an old sick woman, conscious that everyone was escaping her, I almost love her!... I do indeed!"
She sprang up and stood before him and laughed, crying—
"I'm grown up, Dr. Chris, I'm grown up! It's taken a time, but it's happened at last! Meanwhile I shall be the most perfect wife, the most perfect mother, and when the Tiger is restive there'll be the youngest Seddon to put it all into. Oh! What a child that child will be! Roddy and his impatience, me and my tempers——"