And Jinny was like a little creature in a dream. Her idle delicate hands, her plaintive voice were strange. She had on a rose coloured frock, and was eating sweets. Some one had sent her a box of chocolates.
“Look, Mummy, chocolates—we never have them any more, do we, petite mère?”
I had seen the world rushing to destruction; the powers of darkness triumphant. Just beyond those walls, along the road, one came to the edge of the abyss.
“Mummy, I hate the war, c’est si bête—when will it end?” she pouted.
Suddenly I was angry; I felt that it was wrong for my daughter to be like that, wrong and stupid.
“Jinny,” I cried—“are you asleep? Don’t you understand that the world is coming to an end?”
But she looked at me with curious defiant eyes and asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. Come with me tomorrow. Come and see. Come and help—you’re no longer a child. Come!” But she drew away from me with a shiver.
“I couldn’t,” she said in a fine hard little voice.
And your mother broke in,