Thank Heaven Fasting by E. M. Delafield Page B

misery that Frederica’s revolts were, so often, on her behalf.
    For Frederica’s warped and thwarted individuality had thrown out a strange, one-sided growth in the form of a violently protective and possessive solicitude for her sister.
    â€œHave you got a headache?”
    She could never let Cecily alone.
    â€œAre you tired?”
    â€œYou won’t care for that book, Cecily. Have this one instead.”
    She could not even bear to let Cecily read a novel that might bring her into vicarious contact with life. It might mean that she would be hurt. It might mean that she would escape, or wish to escape, from Frederica’s domination.
    Frederica, at twenty-four, would manæuvre elaborately to keep the newspaper out of Cecily’s view, because she did not like her to read it. She wanted Cecily to remain a child. Cecily had once, under the pressure of Lady Marlowe’s mockery and of Frederica’s imperative cross-questionings, admitted that she did think that, really, women ought to have the vote.
    â€œYou can’t really think that. You don’t know enough about it,” Frederica declared, instantly terrified by vague and irrational previsions of Cecily wanting to join the movement, falling under strange influences, perhaps being sent to prison.
    And Lady Marlowe, with her clear, unkind laugh, told Cecily not to be a silly little goose.
    â€œThese women who are making a fuss about getting a vote are simply hysterical old maids, or women who can’t get on with their husbands. They only want to make themselves conspicuous. As if any woman who knew her jobcouldn’t influence at least
one
man to vote the way she wants him to!”
    Then she looked at the two dreary young faces staring back at hers—Frederica’s tense and sullen with suppressed rebellion, and Cecily’s secret and withdrawn, and shrugged her shoulders.
    â€œI only wish you had a man to influence, my poor child. If one of you doesn’t get married soon, I really think you’d better go into a convent, both of you. Though even then, people would only say it was because you couldn’t find anyone to marry you.”
    Frederica, goaded beyond endurance, suddenly exclaimed:
    â€œI don’t want to get married. I hate men. I wouldn’t marry anyone—whoever it was.”
    Lady Marlowe gazed at her in astonishment for a moment, and then laughed again.
    â€œSo you’ve got to that stage, have you?” was all she said.
    Frederica, turning aside—she would not have dared to leave the room without an excuse, and was unable to speak—sank her teeth into the soft flesh of her thin wrist until tiny purple marks sprang into view.
    Lady Marlowe, although she often said cruel things, was not a cruel woman, but only an almost entirely unfeeling one.
    By some curious effort on the part of Nature to redress the balance, she had attracted to herself in the person of her second husband a gentle, serious-minded, and intensely sensitive man, many years older than herself, who had mistaken her liveliness for mirth, her hardness for courage, and her coarseness of fibre for a protective armour, donned to conceal a passionate spirit that should reveal itself to his tenderness. He was himself wholly vulnerable where his affections were concerned, and without the resilience of youth.
    Very soon after his marriage he allowed his natural lethargy—from which the timid dawnings of a belated love had temporarily roused him—to take possession of him altogether.
    Although he was a man to whom physical relations with a woman whom he no longer loved imaginatively soon became entirely repugnant, he felt sure that it was his duty to beget children. Moreover, he lacked the moral courage to risk offending his wife.
    First Frederica, and then Cecily, were brought into the world, to inherit a quadrupled share of their father’s timidity, his fastidiousness, his morbid unwillingness to face