you don’t notice that it ever got me anywhere, do you? No, sir!” she said positively. “There are thousands more just like Gene, who are trying to get ahead and make a name for themselves. Why should he think he’s any better than the rest of them? Why, it might be years before he got a play produced—and even then, how can he tell that it would be a success?—What’s he going to live on? How’s he going to keep going until all this happens? What’s he going to do?—You know, Mama, Gene’s no little boy any more. Please get that into your head,” she said sharply, as if her mother had questioned the accuracy of her remark. “No, sir! No, sir!” she laughed ironically and huskily. “Your baby is a grown man, and it’s time he waked up to the fact that he’s got to support himself from now on.—Mama, do you realize that it has been over four months since Gene left Harvard and, so far as I can see, he has made no effort yet to get a job? What does he intend to do?” she said angrily. “You know, he just can’t mope around like this all his days! Sooner or later he’s got to find some work to do!”
In all these words there was apparent not so much hostility and antagonism as the driving fury and unrest of Helen’s nervous, exacerbated, dissonant, and unhappy character, which could lavish kindness and affection one moment and abuse and criticism the next. These were really only signs of the frenzy and unrest in her large, tortured, but immensely generous spirit. Thus, she would rage and storm at her husband at one moment for “moping about the house,” telling him, “for heaven’s sake am I never to be left alone? Am I never to get a moment’s peace or quiet? Must I have you around me every moment of my life? In God’s name, Hugh—go! go! go!—Leave me alone for a few minutes, I beg of you!”—and by this time his sister’s voice would be cracked and strident, her breath coming hoarsely and almost with a sob of hysteria. And yet, she could be just as violent in her sense of wrong and injustice done to her if she thought he was giving too much time to business, rushing through his meals, reading a book when he should be listening to her tirade, or staying away from home too much.
Poor, tortured, and unhappy spirit, with all the grandeur, valour, and affection that Eugene knew so well, it had found, since her father’s death, no medicine for the huge and constant frenzy of its own unrest, no guide or saviour to work for it the miracle of salvation it must work itself, and it turned and lashed out at the world, demanding a loneliness which it could not have endured for three days running, a peace and quiet from its own fury, a release from its own injustice. And it was for this
