Читать книгу Are Parents People? онлайн

6 страница из 49

Well, the text was not inappropriate, Lita thought; but she had no intention of listening. The situation, besides its practical difficulties, brought all the emotion of her childhood's worries and confusions. One of her very earliest recollections went back to a time when her parents still loved each other. She and her mother had been sitting on the floor playing with paper dolls, and suddenly her father had appeared unexpectedly in the doorway—returned ahead of time from a journey. What Lita specially remembered was the way her mother sprang up in one single long motion and flung herself into his arms, and how they had clung together and gone out of the room without a word to her, leaving her conscious, even at four, that she was forgotten. Presently her mother had sent her nurse, Margaret, to finish the game; but the game was already over. Margaret was desirable when one was tired or hungry or sleepy, but absolutely useless at games of the imagination.

After that Lita could just remember days when she would see her mother crying—peculiar conduct for a grown-up person, since grown-up people were never naughty or afraid and could do anything they wanted to do, and did. It shocked Lita to see her mother cry; it was contrary to the plan of the universe. And then, soon after this, her father, as far as she was concerned, ceased to be; and it must be owned she did not greatly miss him.