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ELLEN TERHUNE
517
The smell of the living-room, though this had been different before,
seemed curiously natural, too. It emanated from the fumes of a hot coal·
grate red-glowing
in
the white marble fireplace, from the stuff of the
garnet curtains·muffling the windows with valances and loops, and from
the pinkish flowered thick-napped carpeting which I told myself was
not really suffocating but which caused me to say to myself, "Brussels
carpet"
in
the moment before I sat down. But I had been at first so stunned
by the whole situation that I had not been able to look at things calmly,
and I now subsided into it in a way that seemed to
be
depriving me of the
power to examine them consciously and closely.
"It was kind of you to come," she said. "My father was extremely
sorry that he had to go to town. He had word this morning that Mr.
Schroeder's condition was worse. It's such a tragedy, isn't it? He was
deceived by the people he trusted, and my father says the shock has almost
killed him." "Yes: I'm sorry not to see your father," I fell readily into
replying. "He told me to tell you you would hear from him," she pur·
sued, going on at once to what was evidently the business before us. "I
don't know how far he has described to you my symptoms" ... "Not in
any great detail," I answered.
r
told myself, suddenly relieved at hitting on a solution for the
strange situation, that the woman was obviously insane and that she was
going to tell me about voices and about people who were working against
her as they had against Mr. Schroeder. But, instead; she began giving me
a very precise, a positively clinical, chronicle uf fainting-fits, spells of
nausea and convulsive intetnal pains. I presently grasped that she was
pregnant and, in my rather lightheaded embarrassment, I was about to ask
her whether she were the mother of the girl I had seen the other day but
I 'pulled myself up at the realization that such a question would be out
of character with the role. I was allowing myself to assume-since the
physician I was supposed to be would undoubtedly know about her child–
ren and would probably not have been here the other day. The question,
in fact, was impossible; I found that I was powerless to put it-I was
powerless to say or do anything that would violate the logic of the scene.
A.nd now, with a beating of the heart, but inevitably and by clear recogni·
tion, I sank into the consciousness that the woman before me was Ellen's
unfortunate mother and that her father was old Dr. Bristead; and I knew–
had already known?-that it had been Ellen herself in her girlhood whom
I had seen on my previous visit: Ellen when she was still in her girlhood
and just before her mother's death; and that the Ellen I had met on the
visit before had been Ellen at some time in her twenties when she had just
come back from Paris. And now here was her mother, a young woman,
just before ·Ellen's birth.
As
this picture became plain in my mind, I
stiffened and sat perfectly still. I was kept tense by the anxiety to follow
her, to say something that played in with the story. The queer thing was
that it had now become impossible for me to set myself right with Time,
because whenever I summoned
tQ
mind the sequence of events in that