And once she began,
what years and years of it there would be! Imagine, thought Scrap,
having most of one's life at the wrong end. Imagine being old for two
or three times as long as being young. Stupid, stupid. Everything was
stupid. There wasn't a thing she wanted to do. There were thousands
of things she didn't want to do. Avoidance, silence, invisibility, if
possible unconsciousness--these negations were all she asked for a
moment; and here, even here, she was not allowed a minute's peace, and
this absurd woman must come pretending, merely because she wanted to
exercise power and make her go to bed and make her--hideous--drink
castor oil, that she thought she was ill.
"I'm sure," said Mrs. Fisher, who felt the cold of the stone
beginning to come through and knew she could not sit much longer,
"you'll do what is reasonable. Your mother would wish--have you a
mother?"
A faint wonder came into Scrap's eyes. Have you a mother? If
ever anybody had a mother it was Scrap. It had not occurred to her
that there could be people who had never heard of her mother. She was
one of the major marchionesses--there being, as no one knew better than
Scrap, marchionesses and marchionesses--and had held high positions at
Court. Her father, too, in his day had been most prominent.
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