"That's an awful thing for any child to say to any mother. Just because I won't let you have your own way in everything. Until your will is resigned to God's will I may well be afraid."
"How do you know God doesn't want me to know Greek? He may want it as much as I do."
"And if you did know it, what good would it do you?"
She stood staring at her mother, not answering. She knew the sound patterns were beautiful, and that was all she knew. Beauty. Beauty could be hurt and frightened away from you. If she talked about it now she would expose it to outrage. Though she knew that she must appear to her mother to be stubborn and stupid, even sinful, she put her stubbornness, her stupidity, her sinfulness, between it and her mother to defend it.
"I can't tell you," she said.
"No. I don't suppose you can."
Her mother followed up the advantage given her. "You just go about dreaming and mooning as if there was nothing else in the wide world for you to do. I can't think what's come over you. You used to be content to sit still and sew by the hour together. You were more help to me when you were ten than you are now. The other day when I asked you to darn a hole in your own stocking you looked as if I'd told you to go to your funeral.
"It's time you began to take an interest in looking after the house. There's enough to keep you busy most of your time if you only did the half of it."
"Is that what you want me to be, Mamma? A servant, like Catty?"
"Poor Catty. If you were more like Catty," her mother said, "you'd be happier than you are now, I can tell you. Catty is never disagreeable or disobedient or discontented."