Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/43

 toes of a once sturdy and powerful Puritan family, " . . . in this room to be truthful and honest is to be perverse."

He would have interrupted her here, angrily, but she raised her hand and continued, "No, Anson; I shall tell you honestly what I think . . . whether you want to hear it or not. I don't hope that it will do any good. . . . I do not know whether, as you put it, your father has behaved dishonorably or not. I hope he has. . . . I hope he was Mrs. Soames' lover in the days when love could have meant something to them. . . . Yes . . . something fleshly is exactly what I mean. . . . I think it would have been better. I think they might have been happy . . . really happy for a little time . . . not just living in a state of enchantment when one day is exactly like the next. . . . I think your father, of all men, has deserved that happiness. . . ." She sighed and added in a low voice, "There, now you know!"

For a long time he simply stood staring at the floor with the round, silly blue eyes which sometimes filled her with terror because they were so like the eyes of that old woman who never left the dark north wing and was known in the family simply as she, as if there was very little that was human left in her. At last he muttered through the drooping mustache, as if speaking to himself, "I can't imagine what has happened to you."

"Nothing," said Olivia. "Nothing. I am the same as I have always been, only to-night I have come to the end of saying 'yes, yes' to everything, of always pretending, so that all of us here may go on living undisturbed in our dream . . . believing always that we are superior to every one else on the earth, that because we are rich we are powerful and righteous, that because . . . oh, there is no use in talking. . . . I am just the same as I have always been, only to-night I have spoken out. We all live in a dream here . . . a dream that some day will turn sharply into a nightmare. And then what