Cornelia was pale. She drew back in her chair as if Tom threatened to strike her. Tom leaned toward her and with a quiet voice went on:
“Cornelia,” he said, “Father is dead. The father we revolted from and left. Tell me, Sister, how have we improved upon him?”
There was a silence. There was calm, very deliberate in Tom. He was smoking a cigarette. He took the red-tipped toy and held it before his eyes and looked at it; he blew on it with his half-parted lips. His lips were very hard against his teeth. The burning tip of the cigarette flared for an instant under the draught, burned more ash.
“Is not that the question which haunts us, Cornelia?”
She had no word for him. She felt he was unjust and cruel. She was helpless under his mood. Always in the past, she had been able—the sister, the mother in Cornelia—to veer him from himself and from herself when his mood went shattering. She had been wise and poiseful. Now she lay quivering with him, underneath his words.
“We don’t talk very often, do we, of father and the past? I wonder why we avoided them. Were they not the scene of our great Victory? Where is our pride, Cornelia?” He was deliberate and slow: his irony stiff like a rod.
“Just think,” he said, “what we left: what we overcame! Father! He is dead now. His remains—all of them, including Ruth and Laura—lie rotting on the Farm. We should be able to make some sort of estimate of what he was....”
She wanted to stop him. She wanted to know. Tom was right. Let them make some estimate of what they were.
“... a man whose blood had turned to poison.... Do you remember how he used to beat his daughters? The thing to remember in that is that he loved it. He had one successful daughter: Laura: she loved it also. And the world we lived in, Cornelia. Few children are brought up in so real a world. We alone had no illusions about America. We knew that in America, quite as elsewhere, only the few were to be saved. The rest were damned. We knew that the deeds of the masses were damned deeds here, quite as in Europe. Yes:—were there illusions about what he told us of the Revolutionary Fathers? or the Pioneers? We were wise children. And the reason was simply that Father taught us to see the truth. Have you ever thought of that? He taught us better than he knew, himself. For Father saw through the real world: he saw what a cold and lustful monster it all is. But he had his way of refuge. He had his God who had predestined him to heaven. Blessed Father! He had his revenge, for there was always the same God damning the irritating mob to hell. For his sake, Sister.... Do you see what I mean? Father gave us his knowledge for weighing facts, which means that he gave us his disillusions about Earth. But we did not stop there. We turned that same power against his own fairy-tales. God went, heaven went, hell went also. All that remained was the Earth that he had taken from us....”
Tom was silent. He smoked measuredly. He went on: