There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat
mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow,
prowling step, her head bent forward. But this he put away. Even his
life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the
inner horror. Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay. It would
never break forth openly. Death would come first.
Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he
could be sure. Since the death of Diana, and the development of his
illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost
to obsession. It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some
responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart.
She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father's dark
hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous. She was
like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her,
really. She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and
most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful
affection for a few things--for her father, and for her animals in
particular. But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run
over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a
faint contraction like resentment on her face: 'Has he?' Then she took
no more notice. She only disliked the servant who would force bad news
on her, and wanted her to be sorry. She wished not to know, and that
seemed her chief motive. She avoided her mother, and most of the
members of her family. She LOVED her Daddy, because he wanted her
always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and
irresponsible in her presence. She liked Gerald, because he was so
self-contained. She loved people who would make life a game for her.
She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure
anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once. For she accepted her equals
wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her
inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they
were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common
people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving
from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or
continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.
The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate
depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never
suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose
the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the
whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so
strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a
soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or
responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the
threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really
nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her
father's final passionate solicitude.