“Because you made me. I’d have been much angrier with anyone else—it was like—like—holding on to a rock, when the water was sucking one away.”
“Bosh,” said Christopher, sitting upright suddenly.
“Look here, Patricia, it was only that I made you take time to think: no one, even you (he put in rudely enough), could be silly enough to make such a little idiot of yourself if you thought a moment. Everyone seems to take it for granted you’ll go on being—stupid—or else they are afraid to stop you, and I—well I won’t have it, Patricia, that’s all. You must jolly well learn to stop.”
His boyish words were rougher than his voice, just as his real feeling in the matter was deeper than his expression of it, and secretly he was a little proud of his achievement and felt a subtle proprietorship over his companion that was not displeasing.
Patricia slipped her arm in his and leant her golden head against him.
“Christopher, I want to tell you all I can remember about it. I don’t know what anyone else has told you.”
“All right, fire away,” returned Christopher resignedly.
“The only thing I can remember at all about my father is seeing him get into rages like that with my mother. I can remember him quite well, at all sorts of times; he was very big and fair, and splendid, but always everything I remember ends in that. And I can remember getting in a rage when I was quite little and seeing my mother turn white, and she jumped up and ran out of the room crying out to Renata. My father was killed hunting when I was six years old and mother 121 died when I was nine years old. Renata was married then, you know, so I came to live with her and Nevil. But always I remembered when I was naughty like that, my mother used to look frightened and go away and our old nurse used to come and scold me and watch me till I could have killed her. Renata, darling Renata, used to talk to me after and make me promise to try and be good, but she, too, was really afraid when I was bad. I suppose they had both had so bad a time with father.” She stopped, gazing out at a misty half-understood tragedy, whose very dimness woke a faint echo of terror in her heart, for she was as surely the daughter of the woman who had suffered as of the man who had caused the suffering.
“That’s all,” said Patricia, with a sudden movement, “everyone always takes it as part of me. Nevil says I’ll outgrow it. I don’t—and Renata cries.”
“And I scold you. Anyhow, it isn’t part of you in my eyes, but just a beastly sort of thing which you let get hold of you, and then it isn’t you at all. It’s all rot inheriting things, though of course, if you think so––” this young philosopher on the much-debated subject shrugged his shoulders.