A Spirit in Prison by Robert Smythe Hichens
page 172 of 862 (19%)
page 172 of 862 (19%)
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"The same thing that makes me wonder when I look at a sleepy lion."
"You call Emile sleepy!" said Hermione. "Oh, not his intellect, Madre! Of course that is horribly, horribly wide awake." And Vere ran off to her room, or the garden, or the Saint's Pool--who knew where?--leaving her mother to say to herself, as she had already said to herself in these last days of the growing summer, "When I said that to Emile, what a fool I was!" She was thinking of her statement that there was nothing in her child that was hidden from her. As if in answer to that statement, Vere was unconsciously showing to her day by day the folly of it. Emile had said nothing. Hermione remembered that, and realized that his silence had been caused by his disagreement. But why had he not told her she was mistaken? Perhaps because she had just been laying bare to him the pain that was in her heart. Her call had been for sympathy, not merely for truth. She wondered whether she was a coward. Since they had returned from Capri the season and Vere had surely changed. Then, and always afterwards, Hermione thought of those three days in Capri as a definite barrier, a dividing line between two periods. Already, while in Capri, she had begun to watch her child in a new way. But that was, perhaps, because of an uneasiness, partly nervous, within herself. In Capri she might have been imagining. Now she was not imagining, she was realizing. Over the sea came to the islet the intensity of summer. Their world was changing. And in this changing world Vere was beginning to show forth more clearly than before her movement onward--whither? |
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