“All day if I like. Mamma pulls up the curtains of course, but I can keep on lying. Then I can sleep, especially if there’s sunshine. One can dream so finely in the sunshine; one can laugh and run, and then it gets so warm, and when one gets up one is so deliciously tired!”
“But after that? Don’t you go to school, don’t you have any work?”
“Papa wants”—she uttered the first word with a peculiar intonation. “Papa (I don’t know whether he is my father,” she added indifferently) “wants me to go away; no matter where, he says. I went to school, but they didn’t suit me there. Now I’m left in peace. Mamma talks to them when they come after me; she has such a proud way with her, mamma has.”
“And what do your parents do?”
She looked up with a scornful dismissal of the subject and made no reply. Suddenly she laughed under her breath.
“Such a funny word!” she said. “It’s out of the catechism, isn’t it?”
“What word?”
“Parents. Oh, I know it means father and mother,” she drawled the words out to a comic length. “Mother is slender,” she continued, “but she’s beginning to get fat and lace herself. You ought to see her when she’s drunk soda water, oh, you just ought to see her! Her teeth aren’t as pretty any more either; she envies me mine.”
“And what does she want you to be?”
“It’s all the same”—her voice was cuttingly hard—“it’s all the same, whatever she wants; it’s all the same, what she says. I shan’t do it anyhow.”