curious,” began Enid lightly. Then with a gentle, almost apologetic smile: “It’s funny, but no, I don’t really want to know.”
It was his turn to lower his eyes. For a long time Francis had dreamed of doing her some important service, of a day when, no longer able to sustain the rare buoyancy with which she went her way—revolving as it were on one toe—Enid would reach out for him to support her full weight. The moment seemed very close. The gravities she withstood, whatever form they took—headaches, committees, another child to bear, the nameless enemy near at
hand—he had felt these things more than once during the past half hour threaten her balance. Francis went so far as to hold his breath. Would it be
now
that she broke down, her eyes brimming over, her head on his knee? He could imagine the very words stammered out: “I cannot bear my life … I’ve never let myself think … he doesn’t love me … so much depends on me ….” And he would be stroking her hair, whispering,
“Let it go, let it go ….” He needed to know that Enid suffered, for proof that his own world was real. Still she gave no sign.
“Did Daddy tell you he was going to Boston next month?” she presently asked.
“What for?”
“He’s found a wonderful doctor there, who treats his kind of heart ailment very successfully. If it works it’s meant to leave you entirely free from pain.”
“How weird,” said Francis.
“Daddy’s terribly excited over it. So am I. When you think of the years he’s suffered, with no hope at all …”
“But would it really be wise?” Francis wondered after a moment. “I mean, doesn’t pain serve to warn him when he goes too far, physically or otherwise? You saw him take that pill just now, and then leave the room. I don’t think it was to wash his teeth at all, so much as to escape from a painful conversation.” He waited to make sure that Enid knew what he meant. “And don’t we all do that,” he pursued,
“to greater or lesser degrees? We needn’t be as sensitive as he, but doesn’t pain teach
us
what we must avoid?”
He saw it as applying marvelously to his sister. But Enid had a wider experience of the subject. “I’m afraid that it”—she wouldn’t in her modesty say “pain”—“teaches us what we
can’t
avoid.” And Francis knew she was right.
“In a way, yes,” he said. “We can’t at least help
others
avoid it. We’re none of us magicians with ointments or heroes with lances. Look at him. He suffers in his mind from not being strong enough to do—what? To do the things he would suffer ten times as much from the physical strain of
doing
, now.”
Enid hummed a single high note.
“No, I think it’s fascinating,” Francis went on. “He knows what hurts him, but does knowing save him?” His eyes brightened to glimpse the purpler reaches of his thought. “Mightn’t the answer be that
everything
hurts him? Pretend he’s a bad example for Lily, call him a Casanova,” he lingered ironically over the word, “and presto! you’ve offended him. Admit that he’s no such
thing, and you’ve made matters even worse. What do you do at his age? Whatever it is, it injures him! One sees what the Hindus were getting at when they said that all action was immoral. It is. It hurts me to talk as I do, it hurts you to listen!”
He was by now very far afield, and as puzzled as Enid by the passion in his voice. What had happened to him? He felt all elated and nervous.She, however, knitted and nodded. Francis had a glimpse of the advantages that went with playing by the rules.
So he let her off, fell silent; and yet a lie had been given not just to Enid but to the room they sat in, so rich with her ideas. He felt he had seen through her ceremony of blandness and taste; it wasn’t a ceremony because it concealed nothing, composed nothing, cost nothing. He decided then and there that she had no other way of being. If she had, dear gentle creature, she