She stood staring at her mother, not answering. She knew the sound patterns were beautiful, and that was all she knew. Beauty. Beauty could be hurt and frightened away from you. If she talked about it now she would expose it to outrage. Though she knew that she must appear to her mother to be stubborn and stupid, even sinful, she put her stubbornness, her stupidity, her sinfulness, between it and her mother to defend it. "I can't tell you," she said. "No. I don't suppose you can." Her mother followed up the advantage given her. "You just go about dreaming and mooning as if there was nothing else in the wide world for you to do. I can't think what's come over you. You used to be content to sit still and sew by the hour together. You were more help to me when you were ten than you are now. The other day when I asked you to darn a hole in your own stocking you looked as if I'd told you to go to your funeral. "It's time you began to take an interest in looking after the house. There's enough to keep you busy most of your time if you only did the half of it." "Is that what you want me to be, Mamma? A servant, like Catty?" "Poor Catty. If you were more like Catty," her mother said, "you'd be happier than you are now, I can tell you. Catty is never disagreeable or disobedient or discontented." "No. But perhaps Catty's mother thinks she is." She thought: She _is_ afraid. "Do you suppose," her mother said, "it's any pleasure to me to find fault with my only daughter? If you weren't my only daughter, perhaps I shouldn't find fault." Her new self answered again, implacable in its lucidity. "You mean, if you'd had a girl you could do what you liked with you'd have let me alone? You'd have let me alone if you could have done what you liked with Mark?" She noticed, as if it had a separate and significant existence, her mother's hand lying on the green cover of the Greek Anthology. "If you were like Mark--if you were only like him!" "If I only were!" "Mark never hurt me. Mark never gave me a minute's trouble in his life." "He went into the Army." "He had a perfect right to go into the Army." Silence. "Minky--you'll be kind to little Mamma." A hard, light sound; the vexed fingers tap-tapping on the book. Her mother rose suddenly, pushing the book from her. "There--take Mark's books. Take everything. Go your own way. You always have done; you always will. Some day you'll be sorry for it." She was sorry for it now, miserable, utterly beaten. Her new self seemed to her a devil that possessed her. She hated it. She hated the books. She hated everything that separated her and made her different from her mother and from Mark. Her mother went past her to the door. "Mamma--I didn't mean it--Mamma--" Before she could reach the door it shut between them. II.