the last
four days. Some of those moments with March down-stairs had been like
blows from a bludgeon. But his daughter's sleepy attempt to concern
herself about his breakfast and the perfunctory caress of that slack
unconscious hand had the effect of the climax of it all.

She'd just been through the crisis of her life. She'd been down chin-deep
in the black waters of tragedy (he didn't yet know, he told himself, what
the elements of the crisis were nor the poisonous springs of the tragedy)
and all her father meant to her was a domestic responsibility, some one
that breakfast must be provided for!

He managed to control his release of her hand and his rising from his
chair so that these actions should not be so brusk as to waken her again
and, leaving the room, went down to his own.

That was the way with children. They remained a part of you but you were
never a part of them. Mary having awakened for her lover, smiled at him,
been reassured by his kiss, had been content to drop off to sleep again.
Her father didn't matter. Not even his derelictions mattered.

He had been derelict. He didn't pretend to evade that. He could have
forgiven her reproaches; welcomed them. But thanks to March, she had
nothing to reproach him for The presence of a man she had known a matter
of weeks obliterated past years like the writing on a child's slate. He
tried to erect an active resentment against the composer. Didn't all his
troubles go back to the day the man had come, to tune the drawing-room
piano? First Paula and then Mary.

None of this was very real and he knew it. There was an underlying
stratum of his consciousness that this didn't get down to at all,
which, when it managed to get a word in, labeled it mere petulance, a
childish attempt to find solace for his hurts in building up a
grievance, a whole fortress of grievances to take shelter in against
the bombardment of facts.

Was this the quality of his bitter four days' quarrel with Paula? Was the
last accusation she had hurled at him last night before she shut herself
in her room, a fact? "Of course, I'm jealous of Mary," she had
acknowledged furiously when he charged her with it. "You don't care
anything about me except for your pleasure. Down there in Tryon, when you
didn't want that, you got rid of me and sent for Mary instead. If that
weren't true, you wouldn't have been so anxious all these years that I
shouldn't have a child."

No, that wasn't a fact, though it