Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/210

 position of housekeeper because her abundant vitality would not be dammed into the sluggish pool of a lonely life. She needed other women to domineer over, to be dependent on her for favours; men, with whom to be alternately jovial and sullen.

It was known that she was the widow of a small hotel-keeper. No one knew that he had married the daughter of a vagrant, half-gypsy, horse dealer who, before entering prison for a long term for stealing and assault, had forced the hotel-man to marry his only daughter, threatening to divulge dark dealings they had had together. Mrs. Jessop had strange blood indeed. She remembered hearing as a child wild tales of the doings of her father's father, whose last necktie had been an unyielding hempen one. Dark, murderous blood was Mrs. Jessop's. .. .

When she left the kitchen she went straight to her bedroom. From a drawer she took out a small flaxen-haired doll. She had dressed it in a neat black dress with a little white apron with shoulder-straps. This doll she had bought at a bazaar the day after she had found Delight Mainprize in Bastien's room. To her it was the symbol of Delight, and on it she vented, when she could contain it no longer, her spleen towards the girl. She pinched it. She struck it on the face. She pulled its hairs out one by one till now it had a bald spot on the back of its head. She stuck pins in it, making, as they entered its body, little squealing noises to represent its pain.

Now, holding the toy in her hand, she looked at it with a ferocious, yet baffled, expression. After all the indignities it had suffered, it still retained its sweet smirk, its pink aloofness. . . . Slowly, meticulously, she did the things to it which had become a kind of rite to her. . . . Again she examined it. Its brown glass eyes stared up at her. Taking a crochet hook from her