Nobody else knew where she was except her sisters. Doris wrote from Los Angeles complaining of slack business. Later Catharine wrote asking for money. And Athalie was obliged to answer that she had none.
Now "none" means not any at all. And the time had now arrived when that was the truth. The chuck-steak cut up on Hafiz's plate in the bathroom had been purchased with postage stamps—the last of a sheet bought by Athalie in days of affluence for foreign correspondence.
There was no more foreign correspondence. Hence
the chuck-steak, and a bottle of milk in the sink and a packet of biscuits on the shelf. And a rather pale, young girl lying flat on the lounge in the front room, her blue eyes wide, staring up at the fading sun-beams on the ceiling.
If she was desperate she was quiet about it—perhaps even at moments a little incredulous that there actually could be nothing left for her to live on. It was one of those grotesque episodes that did not seem to belong in her life—something which ought not—that could not happen to her. At moments, however, she realised that it had happened—realised that part of the nightmare had been happening for some time—that for a good while now, she had always been more or less hungry, even after a rather reckless orgy on crackers and milk.
Except that she felt a little fatigued there was in her no tendency to accept the chose arrivée, no acquiescence in the fait accompli, nothing resembling any bowing of the head, any meek desire to kiss the rod; only a still resentment, a quiet but steady anger, the new and cool opportunism that hatches recklessness.
What channel should she choose? That was all that chance had left for her to decide,—merely what form her recklessness should take.
Whatever of morality had been instinct in the girl now seemed to be in absolute abeyance. In the extremity of dire necessity, cornered at last, face to face with a world that threatened her, and watching it now out of cool, intelligent eyes, she had, without realising it, slipped back into her ragged childhood.
There was nothing else to slip back to, no training, no discipline, no foundation other than her companionship with a mother whom she had loved but who had scarcely done more for her than to respond vaguely to the frankness of inquiring childhood.