Mrs. Warner looked at the boys and Fliss and Dick, all grown so uproarious, at her own husband smoking in placid enjoyment as he and Matthew talked politics.
“But there’s no harm in it, and you can’t dictate in your own house.”
“There is harm in it,” said Cecily, her voice tight and hard. “There is harm in it.”
She stayed there a little longer and then slipped from the room. Upstairs beside her window she stood with her hands pressed to her head as if to still the torrent of painful thought that raged through it. The front of her mind seemed trying to reassure the back of it, she thought—the front persisting that as her mother said “there was no harm”—the back protesting against a violation of ideals and sanctities and against cheapness and frivolity. She did not know how long she stood there, how long it was before she heard Dick’s step in the doorway. At the look on his face she knew that he was conscious of no wrong—he was puzzled and a little angry.
“Your mother sent me to find you. Is anything wrong? Aren’t you well?”
The impossibility of putting her grievance, her torture, so real the moment before, into words confronted her.
“I’m quite all right.” And then, irrepressibly: “Only I don’t see why they should act so ribald on Christmas eve.”
Dick’s face grew hard; a new disagreeable little glint was in his eyes.
“I really can’t see what has come over you, Cecily—why you object to every bit of fun you see around you. You want to run things your own way absolutely—allow no one else to enjoy things that you won’t or can’t enjoy. I don’t think you’re a good hostess or a sport, sulking off up here by yourself.”
He went out and left her fairly stricken with horror, wanting to call him back, wanting to scream, cry, wake up—do anything to undo the fact that he had spoken to her like that on Christmas eve, that the glamour of the day before had been torn across already. Instincts of control struggled for the mastery of her hysteria. And control won. Over her knowledge that the sacredness of Christmas, the sacredness of love was stained and hurt irrevocably, with the memory of that cruel light in Dick’s eyes making her almost dizzy, suddenly aware that Dick was not carelessly disregarding her wishes, but deliberately doing so—she went downstairs. It was very trivial, yet nothing could ever hurt Cecily quite as much again. She would never be quite so unprotected again. In those few moments she had learned the art of concealing pain and going on with things.