Читать книгу The Counterplot онлайн

25 страница из 75

However, emotionally, Pepa had never quite grown up, so perhaps she had missed nothing.

All the same, when he had broken down at her death, there had been something touching and magnificent in his fine pity—not for himself, but for Pepa, so ruthlessly, foolishly, struck down in the hey-day of her splendid vigour. “It’s devilish! devilish!” he had sobbed.

During the last days of her life, Pepa had talked to Teresa a good deal about Anna and Jasper. “Make them want to be nice people,” she had said; and Teresa remembered that, even through her misery, she had wondered that Pepa had not used a favourite Cambridge cliché and said, “Make them want to be splendid people”; perhaps it was she, Teresa, who was undeveloped emotionally.

She had tried hard to do what Pepa had asked her; but in these latter days, when the outlines of the virtues have lost their firmness, it is difficult to give children that concrete sense of Goodness that had made the Victorian mothers’ simple homilies, in after years, glow in the memory of their children with the radiance of a Platonic Myth.