Mrs. Ogden pretended not to notice. "More tea, Joan?" she inquired.
Joan looked at her and hated her; and before the hate had time to root, began to love her again, for the weak thing that she was. There she sat, quiet and soft and utterly incapable. She was not facing this situation, not even trying to realize what it meant to her two daughters.
"But I could crush her to pulp!" Joan thought angrily. "I could make her scream with pain if I chose, if I told her that I saw through her, despised her, hated her; if I told her that I was going to leave her and that she would never see me again. I could make her cry like Milly's crying, only worse; oh, how I could make her cry!" But her own thought hurt her somewhere very deep down, and at that moment Mrs. Ogden looked up and their eyes met.
Joan stared at her coldly. "Milly is fretting," she said. Mrs. Ogden's glance wavered. "She mustn't do that, after what the doctor has told us. Milly, dearest, there's nothing to cry about."
Milly hid her face.
"It's all my life, Mother," she sobbed.
"What is, my dear?"
"My fiddle!"
"But, my dear child, you're not giving up your violin; he only wants you to rest for a time."
Milly sobbed more loudly, she was growing hysterical. "I want to go back to the College," she wailed. "I hate, hate, hate being here! I hate Seabourne and all the people in it, and I hate this house! It stifles me, and I'm not ill and I shan't stop practising and I shan't take cod liver oil!" She wrenched herself free from Joan's restraining arm. "Let me go upstairs," she spluttered. "I want to go upstairs!"