THE OT H ER M ARGARET
495
the various objects from which she had been cutting sections, a prune
and a dried apricot, a sliver of wood, a piece of cheese and what
seemed to be a cockroach. There were tools for carving wood and for
cutting linoleum blocks. The books were beginning to be too many
for the small bookshelf, starting with
The Little Family
and going
on to his own soiled copy of
The Light That Failed
that Margaret
had unearthed. There was her easel and on one wall was a print of
Picasso's trapeze people in flight, like fierce flames, and on another
wall one of Benton's righteous stylizations, both at home, knowing
nothing of their antagonism to each other. The dolls were no longer
so much to the fore as they once were, but they were still about, and
so was the elaborate doll's house which contained in precise miniature,
accumulated over years, almost every object of daily living, tiny skil–
lets, lamps, cups, kettles, packaged groceries. Surrounded by all that
his daughter made and did and read, Elwin could not understand
how she found the time. And then, on the· thought of what time
could be to a child, there came to him with more painful illumination
than usual, the recurrent sentence. "No young man believes he shall
ever die." And he stood contemplating the room with a kind of desola–
tion of love for it.
Margaret burst in suddenly as if she were running away from
something-as indeed she was, for her eyes blazed with the anger she
was fleeing. She flung herself on the bed, ignoring her father's
presence.
"Margaret, what's the matter?" Elwin said.
But she did not answer.
"Margaret
I"
There was the note of discipline in his voice. "Tell
me what the matter is."
She was not crying, but her face, when she lifted it from the
pillow, was red and swollen. "It's mother," she said. "The way she
talked to Margaret."
"To Margaret? Has Margaret come?"
"Yes, she came." The tone implied : through flood and fire.
"And mother--oh
!"
She broke off and shook her head in a rather
histrionic expression of how impossible it was to tell what her mother
had done.
"What did she say that was so terrible?"
"She said-she said, 'Look here--' " But Margaret could not
go on.
Lucy strode into the room with quite as much impulse as Mar–
garet had and with eyes blazing quite as fiercely as her daughter's.
"Look here, Margaret," she said. "I've quite enough trouble with
