What I wanted most of all was to save her from an experience like my own. For her, there were to be no wretched sordid compromises with life, no unclean pleasures, no subterfuges, no lying, no fear. She was to remain good and brave and lovely and I was to find a true man for her who would love her as I longed to have her loved, reverently.
And in the meantime, she was growing up surrounded by slavish servants, by doting relatives, by luxury and dissipation and all that I did to protect her, was to shut her up as much as possible in the schoolroom.
I had always been in the habit of talking to her of Patience Forbes, her great aunt in America. It had seemed to me important for Jinny to understand and value my people. I wanted her to love the woman who had so loved me. To secure for that distant lonely admirable character the respect and affection of my child was, it seemed to me, my duty. And as a little girl Jinny had been interested in hearing about the Grey House in St. Mary’s Plains, the waggon slide down the cellar door, the attic full of old trunks, crammed with faded panniered dresses and poke-bonnets, and the back garden full of hollyhocks and bachelor buttons, and larkspur. She liked to hear of the great river that one glimpsed between the houses at the bottom of the street behind the garden, and of the ships that came smiling down laden with lumber from the great forests, and she would climb into my lap and say—“Now tell me more about when you were a little girl”—but as she grew older she lost interest in these stories, and was more and more unwilling to write to her great aunt and one day, when I finished reading to her a letter from Patience, she gave a sigh and said petulantly,
“What a boring life—‘Quelle vie ennuyeuse.’”
“Jinny!” I exclaimed sharply.
“But it is, Mummy. It must be. I see her there. Ah, Mon Dieu, so dismal. ‘Une vieille—vieille.’ An old old one—in dusty black clothes, in a horrid little room. All her stuffed birds round her in glass cases—so funny! But the atmosphere is cold. It sets the teeth on edge, and she is ugly, like a man, with big feet and hands. There—look!” She took up poor Aunt Patty’s photograph from the table. “Look—what has that old woman to do with me? Why does she write to me ‘My darling little Geneviève’—I’m not her darling, I don’t love her at all. I don’t want to think of her.”
I was very angry. “Jinny, you make me ashamed.”
“I can’t help it,” she almost screamed at me. “I can’t help it. C’est plus fort que moi—she’s strange—she’s ugly.” And she flung the photograph on the floor and stamped her feet—her face was white, her eyes blazing—“I don’t want to think she belongs to us. I don’t want you to love her,” and she flung herself into a chair in a paroxysm of angry tears.
I sent her to bed; it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and gave orders that she was to have bread and milk for her supper but when I went to her later in the evening, though she was quiet, she stuck to her idea.