to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of other-wordliness goaded her to fury.
Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.
“You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don’t even know who you are—you little bastard. You’re not a Gant. Any one can see that. You haven’t a drop of papa’s blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You’re Greeley Pentland all over again.”
She always returned to this—she was fanatically partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene—they were, she thought, the “cold and selfish ones,” and the implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the criminal member of the family gave her an added pleasure. Her union with Luke was now inseparable. It had been inevitable. They were the Gants—those who were generous, fine, and honorable.
The love of Luke and Helen was epic. They found in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them. They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their love was beyond grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant.
“I’ll criticise him if I like,” she said pugnaciously. “I’ve got the right to. But I won’t hear any one else criticise him. He’s a fine generous boy—the finest one in this family. That’s one thing sure.”
Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping. He moved among them like a shadow—he was remote from their passionate fullblooded partisanship. But she thought of him as “generous”—he was, she concluded, a “Gant.”
In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant’s social hypocrisy. They wanted above
