House of All Nations by Christina Stead

to talk to a parent, about a parent? It’s no daughter, it’s a monster. A mannequin. Her mother is the most beautiful, the most charming, kind—I wish you could know my wife, Mr. Bertillon.’
    Henrietta jeered, ‘Beautiful! She’s ugly: her life is one long frustration. She is a wax figure of repressed impulses.’
    â€˜This ridiculous language,’ cried Achitophelous, pressing his hands to the side of his head. ‘You hear that! That’s the way she talks day and night. She thinks she knows everything. Frustrations! A little frustration would have done you good, my lady.’
    With splendidly curling lips, Henrietta declared, ‘This is an age of revolution: children cannot know their parents any more—their parents represent all that is old, hideous, and repressive. The old shell must be cast aside: the new race must spring to the light like—h’m, like—butterflies do.’
    â€˜Thus,’ said Achitophelous, with deep irony, ‘yes, I am a grub. I work for you, rear you, keep you in luxury. Your mother gives you milk, she puts your hair in curl, she looks through your laundry, and she is a grub. You see, Mr. Bertillon. Have you got any daughters, Mr. Bertillon? No. It is a good job, a very good job. I bring her to St. Moritz last autumn to see a very nice young man, young Rhys of Rotterdam. It was all settled. Two hundred thousand francs I was giving her at the wedding and eight hundred thousand when she became twenty-five. He has his father’s business. What does she say? I won’t marry a bourgeois. A bourgeois!’ He sank down into the chair again.
    He leaned forward, with heavy sarcasm, ‘And what will you marry, may I ask?’
    â€˜The man I love,’ said Henrietta, ‘and perhaps not once but many times. I am beautiful. Anyone would marry me.’
    â€˜You would live with someone perhaps, like any little servant-girl.’
    He was shocked when she answered, ‘Of course: and I don’t have to worry about babies: anyone at all would marry me.’
    He took up the tone of the sarcastic pupil again. ‘And who would keep these illegitimate babies, may I ask? Not me.’
    â€˜My husband.’
    He laughed cruelly. ‘Yes. Bolshevism to you, my lady, is illegitimate babies. That is all you think about. Sex.’
    She cried indignantly, with tears in her eyes, ‘I am much more worried about the Kuomintang and about the wicked oppressions in Indo-China than I am about sex.’
    â€˜The Kuomintang!’ Achitophelous pounced. ‘It has been crushing your Reds. Why? No discipline. Life is discipline. All my life has been discipline. Look at your hands! Filthy. Look at your nails. Not polished. Look at your hair: all out of curl. You haven’t been to the manicure for a month. Is there anything in Karl Marx, may I ask, which says, you mustn’t go to the manicure? The Kuomintang is nails, the Kuomintang is hands, the Kuomintang is rebellion against parents. Li-Li-Hsian is scurf-in-the-hair, dead Peng Pai is sex. They didn’t worry about their particular job. This is what you have to worry about, and you don’t. Look at me! Do I like to clean my teeth in the morning? No, I don’t.’ He smiled comically, at this confession. ‘But I do it. Why? Because I know that success is discipline, whether you’re a—bourgeois,’ he shook with laughter, ‘or a Bolshevik. Pah!’
    Henrietta spoke in a cool voice, from the green depths of the chair, ‘All you say is only aimed at getting me to give up knowing Adam Constant the teller and I won’t. You would rather have me marry a rich, stupid boy who can only think of profits, profits—’ she caricatured richly the flung-out hands of the expounding businessman; ‘You are perverted by profit. You might have been a fine man,’ she said with great sadness, ‘but look at you! The new world will never see