“I can’t help it,” she almost screamed at me. “I can’t help it. _C’est
plus fort que moi_--she’s strange--she’s ugly.” And she flung the
photograph on the floor and stamped her feet--her face was white, her
eyes blazing--“I don’t want to think she belongs to us. I don’t want
you to love her,” and she flung herself into a chair in a paroxysm of
angry tears.
I sent her to bed; it was five o’clock in the afternoon, and gave
orders that she was to have bread and milk for her supper but when I
went to her later in the evening, though she was quiet, she stuck to
her idea.
“What did you mean by your terrible behaviour, Jinny?”
She eyed me gravely from her pillow.
“I don’t know, except that it is all dismal and strange in America, and
I can’t like Great Aunt, and if I can’t--why then I can’t--_Cela ne se
commande pas._”
I sat beside her, strangely depressed. Her little white bed with its
rosy hangings, her curly blond head on the lace pillow, the white fur
rug, the shaded lamp, the flickering fire, swam before me, blurred; I
half closed my eyes, and saw another child, an ugly child with a long
pigtail, in a cotton nightgown and flannel wrapper, kneeling by an old
wooden bed in a bare little room, and a tall grizzled woman standing
with a candle while the child said her prayers. “God bless my mother in
Paris and take me to her soon, and make me keep my temper and be like
my Aunt Patty--”