But Addie says nothing—simply sinks into a chair, feeling that the waters are closing round her on every side.
"Oh, Addie, Addie!" exclaims Pauline, disarmed by her mute dejection, "don't be too hard on me, for I couldn't help it—oh, I couldn't help it! You don't know, you can't conceive what a life I've led since I left you—it was unbearable!"
"You've had good food to eat, a soft bed to lie on, warm walls to shelter you, servants to wait on you," says Robert, with a fierce sneer, "which is more than the rest of us have in prospect—more than I shall enjoy for many a long day, Heaven knows!"
"More than I shall have in the charity-school they're trying to get me into," adds Hal, moodily.
"More than your sister will have as a nursery governess in a grocer's family," says Aunt Jo, with dreary emphasis.
"No, no, it isn't—it isn't!" bursts in Pauline passionately. "I'd rather be cabin-boy on board a coal-barge, I'd rather starve at a charity-school, I'd rather teach all the young grocers in England, I'd rather be—be maid-of-all-work in a—a lunatic asylum than go on living with Aunt Selina. Oh, you don't know what it was—what I had to put up with! The very first evening I arrived she began nag, nag, nagging at me, and she has kept it up ever since; her voice is dinning in my ears even now; it haunted me every night in my sleep. Nothing I did, nothing I said, was right. I was clumsy, awkward, uncouth, boisterous, stupid. I could not enter a room, move a chair, or lift a book without making her shiver and the admiral swear. I knew nothing, I could do nothing, not even read the 'Naval Intelligence' without stumbling at every second word. Five times running," continues the girl, with quivering lip, "she has made me walk across the room, shut and open the door, her own maid watching me, until—until I felt inclined to slam it with a force to bring her warm walls about her wretched head. You don't know what it was!"
Nobody makes reply. She looks round at the sullen averted faces, and then bursts out again—
"I wish I hadn't come back to you—you hard-hearted, unfeeling, cruel—I wish—I wish I had thrown myself into the lake at the back of the park, as I ran out one night to do in my anger and pain. But I didn't, because—because I thought of you all and how sorry you'd be. I wish I had now; it would have been better."
Robert shrugs his shoulders and flings a half-consumed cigarette into the grate.
"Better!" he repeats, with a callous laugh. "I won't gainsay you, Polly. I think it would be better still if we made a family-party of the dive—just plunge in in silence together, we five Lefroys. It could be done poetically enough even in the old mill-pond behind the grove. You girls could twine lilies in your hair, Ophelia-wise, and afterward we would haunt the old place, five cold slimy ghosts, and drive the vitriol-man back to the smoke whence he sprung."