At sight of her, the old lady came forward with little fluttering cries to fling her arms about her late husband’s niece. Her manner was that of a shepherd receiving a lost sheep, a manner filled with forgiveness and pity and condescension. The tears welled easily into her eyes and streamed down her face.
Sabine permitted herself, frigidly, to be embraced, and said, “But you don’t look a day older, Aunt Cassie. You look stronger than ever.” It was a remark which somehow set the whole tone of the relationship between them, a remark which, though it sounded sympathetic and even complimentary, was a harsh thing to say to a woman who had cherished all her life the tradition of invalidism. It was harsh, too, because it was true. Aunt Cassie at forty-seven had been as shriveled and dried as she was now, twenty years later.
The old woman said, “My dear girl, I am miserable ... miserable.” And drying the tears that streamed down her face, she added, “It won’t be long now until I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine wanted suddenly to laugh, at the picture of Aunt Cassie entering Paradise to rejoin a husband whom she had always called, even in the intimacy of married life, “Mr. Struthers.” She kept thinking that Mr. Struthers might not find the reunion so pleasant as his wife anticipated. She had always held a strange belief that Mr. Struthers had chosen death as the best way out.
And she felt a sudden almost warm sense of returning memories, roused by Aunt Cassie’s passion for overstatement. Aunt Cassie could never bring herself to say simply, “I’m going to die” which was not at all true. She must say, “I go to join dear Mr. Struthers.”
Sabine said, “Oh, no.... Oh, no.... Don’t say that.”
“I don’t sleep any more. I barely close my eyes at night.”
She had seated herself now and was looking about her, absorbing everything in the room, the changes made by the dreadful O’Hara, the furniture he had bought for the house. But most of all she was studying Sabine, devouring her with sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who was in a way complete.
“Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you.” And again the easy tears welled up.
(“Oh,” thought Sabine, “you don’t catch me that way. You won’t put me back where I once was. You won’t even have a chance to meddle in my life.”)