But clear as a bell and perfectly heard, not only by Kit’s ears, but by his brain, came Helen’s reply. Her voice was as modulated as always, but it rang to an uncommon degree with the fervour of strong conviction and determination, and with no small amount of contempt.
“No, indeed, dear Miss Carrington,” she said. “Not I! I cordially dislike children. It used to be an admission of the lowest criminality to say this, but any number of my generation feel as I do. Why should I want children? Horrid, crude little animals at first, and later on men and women who go off and leave one to get on as one can. Better cultivate adults, select amusing friends, than to set up children and waste one’s best years on a most improbable chance of getting something out of it. I am free, strong, graceful, good-looking. Do you think for one moment I’d lay all that down and be ugly, in order to have a thing that I’d abominate to look at and positively would not handle? Poms or pekes are more sensible, but I’ve no yearning for pets. As to someone to come after me, inherit, all that idiocy, what do I care what happens when I am dead? Ugh, horrible to be dead! Children would perpetually remind you that they were posterity, and posterity is a memento mori. No children for me, ever! Selah! I didn’t intend to wax eloquent, Aunt Anne, but it always riles me to have anyone attribute to me the maternal longing—like a cat, who really is a model mother; I know none more devoted.”
Poor Kit! Grateful to his rubber heels, he turned and walked away. He felt like an aviator whose engine had gone wrong above the clouds diving down to the ground with dizzy speed.
Which was Helen? What was Helen? Could she be playing a part to Miss Carrington? No; her voice was strained with sincerity, and why should she play a part? Kit knew that his aunt’s devotion to the new philosophies would not prevent the shock with which she would hear a young, beautiful woman, endowed in every way to fulfil her rôle in life, repudiate and denounce motherhood.
Then had Helen played a part with him? Much more likely.
He ate his luncheon almost in silence. At intervals he stole a glance at Helen, saw her serene, exquisite; the charm of femininity and grace in every motion of her slender hands, her willowy body. But the meaning of her femininity was gone; only the shell of her beauty was left, if those long, curling fingers would refuse to caress a baby’s cheek.
As soon as lunch was over Kit went toward the door.
“Going off, Kits?” asked Helen. “Not going to stay and be pretty-behaved to me?”
“I’m going to the Berkleys’,” said Kit. “Sorry, but I’m going to the Berkleys’.”
It was like him to make the statement baldly, not to invent an errand to the Berkleys’. It had come to him as he spoke that this was where he was going. The simple happiness of that household, its effortless mutual enjoyment; the love for one another that permeated the atmosphere of the house, rose up before him, and made Kit feel that it was as necessary to get his perturbed mind cleared and cheered by the Berkley family as it could be to find a spring if he were parched with desert thirst.