She rose and, turning to go, she heard him saying, “She might like some lilacs in her room.” He hesitated and in a flat, dead voice, added, “She used to be very fond of flowers.”
Olivia, avoiding the dark eyes, thought, “She used to be very fond of flowers.... That means forty years ago ... forty long years. Oh, my God!” But after a second she said simply, “She has taken a dislike to flowers. She fancies they take up the air and stifle her. The sight of them is very bad for her.”
“I should have known you’d already thought of it.”
For an instant the old man stood facing her with a fixed and searching expression which made her feel shy and led her to turn away from him a little; and then all at once, with an air strangely timid and frightened in a man so grim in appearance, he took her hand and kissing her on the forehead murmured, “You’re a good girl, Olivia. They’re right in what they say of you. You’re a good girl. I don’t know how I should have managed without you all these years.”
Smiling, she looked at him, and then, touching his hand affectionately, she went out without speaking again, thinking, as she had thought a thousand times, what a terrible thing it must be to have been born so inarticulate and so terrified of feeling as John Pentland. It must be, she thought, like living forever imprisoned in a shell of steel from which one might look out and see friends but never touch or know them.
From the doorway she heard a voice behind her, saying almost joyfully: “The doctors must have been wrong about Jack. You and I together, Olivia, have defeated them.”
She said, “Yes,” and smiled at him, but when she had turned away again there was in her mind a strange, almost gruesome thought.
“If only Jack lives until his grandfather is dead, the old man will die happy. If only he can be kept alive until then....”
She had a strange way of seeing things in the hard light of reality, and an unreal, lonely childhood had fostered the trait. She had been born thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse than a blessing. In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong. Here, perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her. But there were times, too, when she wanted passionately to be a poor weak feminine creature, a woman who might turn to her husband and find in him some one stronger than herself. She had a curious feeling of envy for Savina Pentland, who was dead before she was born.... Savina Pentland who had been the beauty of the family, extravagant, reckless, feminine, who bought strings of pearls and was given to weeping and fainting.
But she (Olivia) had only Anson to lean upon.