The reply, which came late, was what she had expected. "No, we have all the
help we need. The doctor has sent a good nurse, and is coming again later.
It's pneumonia, but of course he doesn't say much yet. Let me have some
beef-juice as soon as the cook can make it."
The beef-juice ordered and dispatched, she was left to a vigil in
melancholy contrast to that of the previous evening. Then she had been
enclosed in the narrow limits of her maternal interests; now the barriers
of self were broken down, and her personal preoccupations swept away on the
current of a wider sympathy. As she sat there in the radius of lamp-light
which, for so many evenings, had held Dick and herself in a charmed circle
of tenderness, she saw that her love for her boy had come to be merely a
kind of extended egotism. Love had narrowed instead of widening her, had
rebuilt between herself and life the very walls which, years and years
before, she had laid low with bleeding fingers. It was horrible, how she
had come to sacrifice everything to the one passion of ambition for her
boy.
Pages:
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93