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a bodiced petticoat of pink flannelette, which hardly reached her knees. Siegmund felt slightly amused to see her stout little calves planted so firmly close together. She carefully sponged her cheeks, her pursed-up mouth, and her neck, soaping her hair, but not her ears. Then, very deliberately, she squeezed out the sponge and proceeded to wipe away the soap.
For some reason or other she glanced round. Her startled eyes met his. She, too, had beautiful dark blue eyes. She stood, with the sponge at her neck, looking full at him. Siegmund felt himself shrinking. The child’s look was steady, calm, inscrutable.
‘Hello!’ said her father. ‘Are you here!’
The child, without altering her expression in the slightest, turned her back on him, and continued wiping her neck. She dropped the sponge in the water and took the towel from off the side of the bath. Then she turned to look again at Siegmund, who stood in his pyjamas before her, his mouth shut hard, but his eyes shrinking and tender. She seemed to be trying to discover something in him.
‘Have you washed your ears?’ he said gaily.
She paid no heed to this, except that he noticed her face now wore a slight constrained smile as she looked at him. She was shy. Still she continued to regard him curiously.
‘There is some chocolate on my dressing-table,’ he said.
‘Where have you been to?’ she asked suddenly.
‘To the seaside,’ he answered, smiling.
‘To Brighton?’ she asked. Her tone was still condemning.
‘Much farther than that,’ he replied.
‘To Worthing?’ she asked.
‘Farther — in a steamer,’ he replied.
‘But who did you go with?’ asked the child.
‘Why, I went all by myself,’ he answered.
‘Twuly?’ she asked.
‘Weally and twuly,’ he answered, laughing.
‘Couldn’t you take me?’ she asked.
‘I will next time,’ he replied.
The child still looked at him, unsatisfied.
‘But what did you go for?’ she asked, goading him suspiciously.
‘To see the sea and the ships and the fighting ships with cannons —’
‘You might have taken me,’ said the child reproachfully.
‘Yes, I ought to have done, oughtn’t I?’ he said, as if regretful.
Gwen still looked full at him.
‘You are red,’ she said.
He glanced quickly in the glass, and replied:
‘That is the sun. Hasn’t it been hot?’
‘Mm! It made my nose all peel. Vera said she would scrape me like a new potato.’ The child laughed and turned shyly away.
‘Come here,’ said Siegmund. ‘I believe you’ve got a tooth out, haven’t you?’
He was very cautious and gentle. The child drew back. He hesitated, and she drew away from him, unwilling.
‘Come and let me look,’ he repeated.
She drew farther away, and the same constrained smile appeared on her face, shy, suspicious, condemning.
‘Aren’t you going to get your chocolate?’ he asked, as the child hesitated in the doorway.
She glanced into his room, and answered:
‘I’ve got to go to mam and have my hair done.’
Her awkwardness and her lack of compliance insulted him. She went downstairs without going into his room.
Siegmund, rebuffed by the only one in the house from whom he might have expected friendship, proceeded slowly to shave, feeling sick at heart. He was a long time over his toilet. When he stripped himself for the bath, it seemed to him he could smell the sea. He bent his head and licked his shoulder. It tasted decidedly salt.
‘A pity to wash it off,’ he said.
As he got up dripping from the cold bath, he felt for the moment exhilarated. He rubbed himself smooth. Glancing down at himself, he thought: ‘I look young. I look as young as twenty-six.’
He turned to the mirror. There he saw himself a mature, complete man of forty, with grave years of experience on his countenance.
‘I used to think that, when I was forty,’ he said to himself, ‘I should find everything straight as the nose on my face, walking through my affairs as easily as you like. Now I am no more sure of myself, have no more confidence than a boy of twenty. What can I do? It seems to me a man needs a mother all his life. I don’t feel much like a lord of creation.’
Having arrived at this cynicism, Siegmund prepared to go downstairs. His sensitiveness had passed off; his nerves had become callous. When he was dressed he went down to the kitchen without hesitation. He was indifferent to his wife and children. No one spoke to him as he sat to the table. That was as he liked it; he wished for nothing to touch him. He ate his breakfast alone, while his wife bustled about upstairs and Vera bustled about in the dining-room. Then he retired to the solitude of the drawing-room. As a reaction against his poetic activity, he felt as if he were gradually becoming more stupid and blind. He remarked nothing, not even the extravagant bowl of grasses placed where he would not have allowed it — on his piano; nor his fiddle, laid cruelly on the cold, polished floor near the window. He merely sat down in an arm-chair, and felt sick.
All his unnatural excitement, all the poetic stimulation of the past few days, had vanished. He felt flaccid, while his life struggled slowly through him. After an intoxication of passion and love, and beauty, and of sunshine, he was prostrate. Like a plant that blossoms gorgeously and madly, he had wasted the tissue of his strength, so that now his life struggled in a clogged and broken channel.
Siegmund sat with his head between his hands, leaning upon the table. He would have been stupidly quiescent in his feeling of loathing and sickness had not an intense irritability in all his nerves tormented him into consciousness.
‘I suppose this is the result of the sun — a sort of sunstroke,’ he said, realizing an intolerable stiffness of his brain, a stunned condition in his head.
‘This is hideous!’ he said. His arms were quivering with intense irritation. He exerted all his will to stop them, and then the hot irritability commenced in his belly. Siegmund fidgeted in his chair without changing his position. He had not the energy to get up and move about. He fidgeted like an insect pinned down.
The door opened. He felt violently startled; yet there was no movement perceptible. Vera entered, ostensibly for an autograph-album into which she was going to copy a drawing from the London Opinion, really to see what her father was doing. He did not move a muscle. He only longed intensely for his daughter to go out of the room, so that he could let go. Vera went out of the drawing-room humming to herself. Apparently she had not even glanced at her father. In reality, she had observed him closely.
‘He is sitting with his head in his hands,’ she said to her mother.
Beatrice replied: ‘I’m glad he’s nothing else to do.’
‘I should think he’s pitying himself,’ said Vera.
‘He’s a good one at it,’ answered Beatrice.
Gwen came forward and took hold of her mother’s skirt, looking up anxiously.
‘What is he doing, Mam?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ replied her mother —‘nothing; only sitting in the drawing-room.’
‘But what has he been doing?’ persisted the anxious child.
‘Nothing