“What did you mean by your terrible behaviour, Jinny?”
She eyed me gravely from her pillow.
“I don’t know, except that it is all dismal and strange in America, and I can’t like Great Aunt, and if I can’t—why then I can’t—Cela ne se commande pas.”
I sat beside her, strangely depressed. Her little white bed with its rosy hangings, her curly blond head on the lace pillow, the white fur rug, the shaded lamp, the flickering fire, swam before me, blurred; I half closed my eyes, and saw another child, an ugly child with a long pigtail, in a cotton nightgown and flannel wrapper, kneeling by an old wooden bed in a bare little room, and a tall grizzled woman standing with a candle while the child said her prayers. “God bless my mother in Paris and take me to her soon, and make me keep my temper and be like my Aunt Patty—”
I had failed—I had failed.
But Jinny’s voice roused me. “Papa says it is an ugly country, America—miles and miles of empty fields, just grass and grass stretching all round.”
“Your father has never been there.”
“I know, but he knows about it. He says he would never go there, not for anything, and that I needn’t—so if I’m never to see Great Aunt—why bother?”
Why indeed? They were too much for me, those two, my husband and my child.
In my depressed moods I used to go to see Clémentine. She listened patiently, lying on a couch in purple pyjamas, smoking a cigarette through a holder a foot long, and watching me intently while I explained that I was no longer in control of my own life, that I was as impotent as a paralytic, and that I hadn’t even the feeling of being a part of anything that made up existence.