mber once telling me about Mr. Brun's Tiger? I've often
thought of it since and it seems to me now that to all of us--for Roddy
and Francis and Lizzie and me--the moment of our consciousness came.
Ever since that day when they carried Roddy back to Seddon each one of
us has had to wait, just holding ourselves in.... But, you know, Dr.
Chris, that's the secret of the whole matter. It wasn't I, or Breton, or
even Lizzie or Roddy that defeated grandmother--it was simply Real Life.
First the War, then Roddy's accident--Roddy's accident most of all. We
had, all five of us, been leading sham lives, then suddenly God, Fate,
Providence, what you will, steps in, jerks us all back, takes away from
all of us what we thought we wanted most, puts us in line with the real
thing--our Tiger, if you like. Grandmother simply couldn't stand it.
Lizzie and Roddy are real--half of Breton and me, and most of
grandmother unreal--Well, Lizzie and Roddy have just put things straight
quietly.... Grandmother's generation saw things 'through a glass
darkly'--They're gone. It's all going to be 'face to face' now."

Christopher looked at her, smiling. She was so young, so adorably young
with her seriousness.

She broke in--"What rot I'm talking! It only comes to this, that I wish
now, like anything, that I'd been nicer to grandmamma. One sees things
always too late.... I'd like to have another try, to begin with
grandmamma again, to be more tolerant, to hate her less. But I expect in
the end it would be the same. She'd have had me tied up, without a will
of my own, without a word to say!... that was her idea of controlling us
all. It's over, it's done with--no one, I expect, will have her kind of
power again.... But she was fine! I only see now how fine she was!

"No one, I expect, will have her kind of power again...."

Now she stood away from Christopher, looking at him and also beyond him,
as though she were finally, once and for all, surveying, cataloguing
that same power--

"She wasn't terrible, she wasn't fine, she wasn't really anything except
a kind of peg for all sorts of traditions to hang on to. In herself she
was just a plucky, theatrical, obstinate old woman. It was simply the
idea of her that frightened us all. I remember the first time that I saw
Yale Ross's picture of her--He'd caught all the ceremony and the terror.
It was then that I had the first faint suspicion that she didn't, in
herself, live up to the picture in the least.