Читать книгу White Narcissus онлайн

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He smiled bitterly. 'It is always of her you speak,' he added, with a surprising acrimony, for his thwarted feeling was being transferred to annoyance in behalf of the representative of his own sex in this generation-long quarrel. 'Doesn't your father feel? Do you think he doesn't know the bitter of loneliness and misprision as well as your mother?'

'Father, of course. I know that, and it is why things are as they are. Possibly if I could take sides, there could be some outcome, even to strife. But I see, I understand too well, so that there is no hope. I see the sadness of both, and how oblivion awaits it all ... across a mist of pathos like dreaming.'

'You're too sympathetic,' said the man gruffly. He wanted to add that she had been thinking about it too much. 'Surely something could be done. I tell you, it would be a tonic, a rough cold-blooded treatment. Why, they could have been laughed out of everything, or I'm mistaken. To go on in this way—it's absurd....' But he spoke less from reason than desperation, with a maddeningly increasing sense of impotence in the smothering shroud of time and place, the overpowering creep of memories that die only to haunt implacably. 'It's plain to me that your father has a good deal to complain of. Perhaps you don't know that there are many kinds of men with whom no—no such situation could exist.'