"I must do something."
"Why don't you take a book and read?"
"I can't read."
"Well—why don't you go out for a walk?"
"Too tired."
"You'd better go and lie down in your room."
She hated her room. Everything in it reminded her of the day after Mark died. The rows of new books reminded her; and Mark's books in the narrow bookcase. They were hers. She would never be asked to give them back again. Yesterday she had taken out the Aeschylus and looked at it, and she had forgotten that Mark was dead and had felt glad because it was hers. To-day she had been afraid to see its shabby drab back lest it should remind her of that, too.
Her mother sighed and put her book away. She sat with her hands before her, waiting.
Her face had its old look of reproach and disapproval, the drawn, irritated look you saw when you came between her and Mark. As if your grief for Mark came between her and her grief, as if, deep down inside her, she hated your grief as she had hated your love for him, without knowing that she hated it.
Suddenly she turned on you her blurred, wounded eyes.