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Updated: May 31, 2025
Violet had been aware that she was being hurried away when Ranny came in sight, and it had made her the more set. As for Winny's hope that Violet would forget all about Ranny when some other man appeared, it was futile as long as she took care of Violet. Taking care of Violet meant keeping her as far as possible out of the way of other men so that there again!
She dropped her knife, at Theodore's question, and gave vent to her old-time exclamation: "Deary me, what notion has the dear boy got now?" "He has an Inebriate Asylum in view, mother, and wants to engage you for physician, and your daughter for matron." This was Winny's grave explanation. Theodore did not even smile. She had unwittingly touched too near the subject of his thoughts.
He saw Winny's withered face and her withered arms that were grey like crumbled earth, and weak as he was he shrank back farther towards the wall.
Why, they must be hundreds of years ahead of us in civilization, to have thought it all out like that. Think of it, that fellow Beda's had a better chance than me." She looked so long at Baby Francis that Ranny couldn't bear it. "Oh, look at him, Ranny! Isn't he a little lamb?" Winny's eyes were tender, and her face quivered with a little dreamy smile.
"You're right Jack," he said, after a pause, during which he contemplated the picture with the most fixed attention: "this must have been my father!" "No doubt of it," answered Sheppard; "only compare it with Winny's drawing, and you'll find they're as like as two peas in a pod." "Where did you get it?" inquired Thames. "From Lady Trafford's, where I took the box."
The children's voices, the high, reiterated singsong, "Where we goin'?" Winny's voice, poignantly soft, insufferably patient, answering them with all that tender silliness, that persistent, gentle, intolerably gentle tommy-rot. For all the time he was saying to himself, "She doesn't care. She doesn't care a hang. It's them she cares for. It's them she wants. It's them she's wanted all the time.
He put his hands on Winny's waist to guide her when, in her excitement, she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when they ran locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great Wheel; but it was as if he held and caught, and was locked together with a child. Winny's charm was gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and absurdity; gone the magic and the madness of the running.
"We had grand times there together," he said then. "Do you remember the Combined Maze?" She remembered. "Sometimes I think that life's like that a maze, Winny. A sort of Combined Maze men and women mixed up together." She thought so too. Violet had got used to Winny's being there. She took it for granted, as if it also were one of those things that had to be.
Outside in the sunlight his tears dazzled him an instant and sank back into their stinging ducts. Yes, it had stung him. And he had got to end it, somehow, for Winny's sake. He had no idea how to set about it. He could not let the little thing come and do his wife's work for her, like that, on the sly, for nothing. And yet he could not tell her not to come.
A feminine voice gave the sharp word of command, and the Young Ladies formed up for their performance on the parallel bars. Miss Usher still sat averted. "Look," he said, at last, "it's Winny's turn." She turned slowly, reluctantly almost, and looked. Winny Dymond, shy, but grave and earnest, was going through her little preliminary byplay at the bars.
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