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Updated: June 9, 2025
He hated the sound of John-James' boots that never failed to go a tip-toe over the cobbles below his window. He wanted nothing, not even to get away from it all. He was too absorbed watching it upon the wall, hearing his own mind ticking out its comments like that horrible instrument Vassie had upon the piano to time her exercises.
One evening of winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of the bath, and Vassie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the room she had arranged according to her modern ideas the modernity of '69 as a nursery.
Vassie had grown in discontent, Annie in melancholy. The girl herself might probably would, with her beauty and adaptability have won a place with Ishmael had it not been for the mother.
Blanche cried out in pity, while Vassie calmly advised death, seconded by Phoebe, and Judith looked away, sorry and sick, Blanche called to Ishmael, using his Christian name for the first time publicly, and aware of it herself and of its effect on Vassie through all her real pity.
So he fussed, while Miss Grey, with a murmured thanks, sank into the chair Ishmael shyly offered her and waited very simply, her hands folded on her lap. There was a simplicity, a lack of any self-consciousness, in her whole manner, so Ishmael, used to Phoebe and Vassie neither of whom was the same in men's company that she was out of it told himself.
Phoebe's smiles, her little friendliness, had always belonged to him Archelaus would crush them as big fingers rub the powder off a butterfly's wings.... If he and Archelaus had been more truly brothers it would have been a very nice arrangement ... little Phoebe would make a sweeter sister in some ways than the imperious Vassie....
But this was something different this aching sense of helplessness, of a passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof nor Nicky on the far veldt.
Upstairs Vassie was tying her hair brushed out now into a short, crimped fluff that made her look more like an angel than ever with the blue ribbon; while Archelaus and Tom greased their locks with the remains of Tom's stolen butter. Soon Annie and John-James also went upstairs to prepare themselves for the feast, and the kitchen grew slowly dark.
"Then you would come? My sister Vassie you'd like her. And I think even my mother would love you. It would be so good for you after all this." She did not reply at once and Ishmael's heart sank. "Your father...." he murmured; "I suppose you feel " She interrupted with a sudden radiance: "Oh, no, it's not that. My father is married again, you know.... I don't often talk of it; it was a grief to me.
Ishmael, though he had first held aloof and then been terrified when Vassie insisted on his taking the fragile little body in his arms, had yet felt a thrill go through him when he did so. It was not possible for a man to have the feeling for the land that he had and not both crave for a child and feel a deep-rooted emotion at its possession.
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