As they picked their way cautiously between paint cans and piles
of building refuse, Lary discovered that the workmen had erected a
barricade between the front hall and the living-room, and the angle of
the stairway shut the chimney corner from view. On the second floor
there was another obstacle. The floors had been newly waxed, and a
stern “Verboten” flaunted its impotent arrogance in their path. They
continued their climb to the third floor, where children, servants,
billiards, and winter garments would be harboured. Judith paused in the
door to the nursery, crossed the room and sank, exhausted, in the wide
window seat. Lary found place beside her, as he told her of the clever
girl who had done the Peter Pan frieze above the yellow painted wall.
“Are you fond of children, Lary?” She was thinking of Eileen.
“No, I detest them.”
“You-- But how can you say such a thing? Your understanding with
Theodora is perfect. You kindle, you glow, when you are telling her
stories from the classics.”
“That’s because she isn’t a child. I believe she never was. But my
affection for her didn’t begin when she was.... The first few months,
I believe I hated her. I may tell you about it some time. When I
lose patience with my mother--and other women--I think about that
hideous afternoon, twelve years ago last December. I don’t believe any
child--or anything else that men and women are at such a bother to
create and leave behind them--is worth all that suffering.”
Mrs. Ascott withdrew, ever so little. She did not like Larimore Trench
when his tone revealed that peculiar timbre, that quality of boyish
cynicism. He had seen so much of books, so little of life. And then it
came to her that he viewed everything in the sordid world--the world
outside his imagination--through the distorting lenses of his mother’s
personality, her limitations and her prejudices. In his most violent
opposition he was, nevertheless, directed by her. He would go to the
south pole ... because she stood obstinately at the north. It was she
who shaped his course, determined his stand. Her insistence on the
fundamental importance of material progress drove him early to the post
of disinterested onlooker. That he did his work, and did it well, was
a reflex of his inner nature, the nature that came to him when David’s
fineness and Lavinia’s dynamic ardour were fused, in a moment of
unthinking contact. And it was the penalty of such fusing, that neither
of his parents comprehended the nature they had given him.