"I can't help it if the things I think of make me happy. And you don't know how nice it feels to be free." "Precious freedom!--to do what you like and think what you like, without caring." "There's a part of me that doesn't care and there's a part that cares frightfully." The part that cared was not free. Not free. Prisoned in her mother's bedroom with the yellow furniture that remembered. Her mother's face that remembered. Always the same vexed, disapproving, remembering face. And her own heart, sinking at each beat, dragging remembrance. A dead child, remembering and returning. "I can't think where you got it from," her mother was saying. "Unless it's those books you're always reading. Or was it that man?" "What man?" "Maurice Jourdain." "No. It wasn't. What made you think of him?" "Never you mind." Actually her mother was smiling and trying not to smile, as if she were thinking of something funny and improper. "There's one thing I must beg of you," she said, "that whatever you choose to think, you'll hold your tongue about it." "All my life? Like Aunt Lavvy?" "There was a reason why then; and there's a reason why now. Your father has been very unfortunate. We're here in a new place, and the less we make ourselves conspicuous the better." "I see." She thought: "Because Papa drinks Mamma and Roddy go proud and angry; but I must stoop and hide. It isn't fair." "You surely don't want," her mother said, "to make it harder for me than it is." Tears. She was beaten. "I don't want to make it hard for you at all." "Then promise me you won't talk about religion." "I won't talk about it to Mrs. Waugh." "Not to anybody." "Not to anybody who wouldn't like it. Unless they make me. Will that do?" "I suppose it'll have to." Mamma held her face up, like a child, to be kissed. VIII. The Sutcliffes' house hid in the thick trees at the foot of Greffington Edge. You couldn't see it. You could pretend it wasn't there. You could pretend that Mr. Sutcliffe and Mrs. Sutcliffe were not there. You could pretend that nothing had happened. There were other houses. IX. The long house at the top of the Green was gay with rows of pink and white sun-blinds stuck out like attic roofs. The poplars in the garden played their play of falling rain. You waited in the porch, impatient for the opening of the door. "Mamma--what _will_ it be like?" Mamma smiled a naughty, pretty smile. She knew what it would be like. There was a stuffed salmon in a long glass case in the hall. He swam, over a brown plaster river bed, glued to a milk-blue plaster stream. You waited in the drawing-room. Drab and dying amber and the dapple of walnut wood. Chairs dressed in pallid chintz, holding out their skirts with an air of anxiety. Stuffed love-birds on a branch under a tall glass shade. On the chimney-piece sand-white pampas grass in clear blood-red vases, and a white marble clock supporting a gilt Cupid astride over a gilt ball.