He would have been so manly! If he
had lived, how different everything would have been, how incredibly
different! For of course, if he had lived she would have been happy in
spite of Frederick. And happiness was all she wanted.
She brushed the tears from her flushed cheeks, and propping her chin
in her hands stared into the fire, thinking--thinking.... Her
childhood had been passed with her father's mother, a silent woman who
with bitter expectation of success had set herself to discover in
Helena traits of the poor, dead, foolish wife who had broken her son's
heart. "Grandmamma hated me," Helena Richie reflected. "She begrudged
me the least little bit of pleasure." Yet her feeling towards the hard
old woman now was not resentment; it was only wonder. "_Why_ didn't
she like me to be happy?" she thought. It never occurred to her
that her grandmother who had guarded and distrusted her had also loved
her. "Of course I never loved her," she reminded herself, "but I
wouldn't have wanted her to be unhappy. She wanted me to be wretched.
Curious!" Yet she realized that at that time she had not desired love;
she had only desired happiness. Looking back, she pondered on her
astounding immaturity; what a child she had been to imagine that
merely to get away from that gray life with her grandmother would be
happiness, and so had married Frederick. Frederick.... She was
eighteen, and so pretty.
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