How bitterly Mrs. Kennedy missed her wayward and troublesome child, who
had ordered her about and sworn at her, and so vehemently kissed her!
This neat young woman, busy at her books in the kitchen every evening,
always up and dressed at the right time in the morning, was a stranger,
was in no way hers. She would sit in the rocking-chair--after the
kitchen was clean and tidy--and take up the newspaper Angelica had
brought in, or perhaps a magazine, and pretend to read; but she never
could. She had no habit of reading. Her great need was to talk.
She would look at her daughter, and rock and sigh. A weary world, where
even rest had lost its beauty!
There were sometimes evenings when Miss Sillon and Miss Devery invited
Angelica to go with them to one of the little Italian restaurants in the
neighbourhood. In this case Angelica was always punctilious to telephone
to her mother, and she was never out later than ten, so that it didn’t
occur to her to pity the wretched woman.
She didn’t imagine how terrible those evenings were to Mrs. Kennedy, how
she groped about the kitchen, blinded by tears, setting out her tiny
meal, finding relief in loud sobs like hiccoughs. She saw that something
was the matter with her mother, but she fancied that it was age, ill
health, poverty, years of hardship.
It was none of these pains which so grievously afflicted Mrs. Kennedy.
It was because she was being left behind. She who had all her life
feared and foreseen that she would be obliged to die and leave her
beloved child, now saw this child--as she had known her--quite dead and
gone, and herself left desolate.