I felt for my mother the wound of that. And why, I asked Bettina, did she feel so? Almost sulkily she said that if I wanted our mother told things, I could tell her about myself. "What on earth do you mean?" I said. "There's nothing to hear about me." "Oh, very well," Betty said; "then there's nothing to tell." And the sad part of it was that, after that, Betty began to be reserved with me too. I was so afraid of the effect of our secretiveness on my mother that I learned how to interest her in people neither Betty nor I were the least interested in. I saved up stories and "characteristics" to tell. The very success of these small efforts gave me secretly a sense of the emptiness of her life. To have nothing to think about but a couple of girls!--girls who were thinking all the while about things their mother didn't know. I could have cried out at the dreadfulness of such a fate. I felt it uneasily as a menace. Could she, when she was in her teens, have felt the least as I did? Oh, impossible! And yet.... "Tell me about when you were young," I said; but with the new insistence, now, of one bent on grasping the unexplained things in another's life, the better to understand the unexplained things in her own. I could not make much of the few bony facts. Her father had had a small Government post, and she had told us before that when she was three she lost her mother. The only new fact to emerge was that she had not been happy at home. She tried to make out the reason was that she loved fields and gardens, and her father's pursuits kept them in the town. But try as I might I couldn't see the life she led there. I struggled against the sense of my impotence to realise her under any conditions but those at Duncombe. Feeling myself incredibly bold, I reminded her of old sayings about confidence between mothers and daughters. "I am always telling you things about us. You know exactly," I said (unconscious at the moment of the lie)--"you know all that happens to us, and what life looks like at every turn. We know so little about you except where the house was you lived in, and that it was dingy and big."