The violet ashen sheet clung to the furred soot of the chimney: you could still see the blenched letters. She couldn't really have thought it would make you conceited. That was only what she wanted to think she had thought. "It wasn't easy to make you pleased with me all the time.... Still, I can't think why on earth you weren't pleased." She knelt before the fire, watching the violet ashen bit of burnt-out paper, the cause, the stupid cause of it all. Her mother had settled again, placidly, in her chair. "Even if I _was_ a bit conceited.... I don't think I was, really. I only wanted to know whether I could do things. I wanted people to tell me just because I didn't know. But even if I was, what did it matter? You must have known I loved you--desperately--all the time." "I didn't know it, Mary." "Then you were stup--" "Oh, say I was stupid. It's what you think. It's what you always have thought." "You were--you were, if you didn't see it." "See what?" "How I cared--I can remember--when I was a kid--the awful feeling. It used to make me ill." "I didn't know that. If you did care you'd a queer way of showing it." "That was because I thought you didn't." "Who told you I didn't care for you?" "I didn't need to be told. I could see the difference." Her mother sat fixed in a curious stillness. She held her elbows pressed tight against her sides. Her face was hard and still. Her eyes looked away across the room. "You were different," she said. "You weren't like any of the others. I was afraid of you. You used to look at me with your little bright eyes. I felt as if you knew everything I was thinking. I never knew what you'd say or do next." No. Her face wasn't hard. There was something else. Something clear. Clear and beautiful. "I suppose I--I didn't like your being clever. It was the boys I wanted to do things. Not you." "Don't--Mamma darling--_don't_." The stiff, tight body let go its hold of itself. The eyes turned to her again. "I was jealous of you, Mary. And I was afraid for my life you'd find it out." V. Eighteen ninety-eight. Eighteen ninety-nine. Nineteen hundred. Thirty-five--thirty-six--thirty-seven. Three years. Her mind kept on stretching; it held three years in one span like one year. The large rhythm of time appeased and exalted her. In the long summers while Mamma worked in the garden she translated _Euripides_. The _Bacchae_. You could do it after you had read Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ought to be. Something between talking and singing. If you wrote verse that could be chanted: that could be whispered, shouted, screamed as they moved. Agave and her Maenads. Verse that would go with a throbbing beat, excited, exciting; beyond rhyme. That would be nearest to the Greek verse. * * * * * September, nineteen hundred.