Washington Square

“Handling bruises—and even dropping tears on them—doesn’t make them any better!  My business is to see she gets no more knocks, and that I shall carefully attend to.  But I don’t at all recognise your description of Catherine.  She doesn’t strike me in the least as a young woman going about in search of a moral poultice.  In fact, she seems to me much better than while the fellow was hanging about.  She is perfectly comfortable and blooming; she eats and sleeps, takes her usual exercise, and overloads herself, as usual, with finery.  She is always knitting some purse or embroidering some handkerchief, and it seems to me she turns these articles out about as fast as ever.  She hasn’t much to say; but when had she anything to say?  She had her little dance, and now she is sitting down to rest.  I suspect that, on the whole, she enjoys it.”

“She enjoys it as people enjoy getting rid of a leg that has been crushed.  The state of mind after amputation is doubtless one of comparative repose.”

“If your leg is a metaphor for young Townsend, I can assure you he has never been crushed.  Crushed?  Not he!  He is alive and perfectly intact, and that’s why I am not satisfied.”

“Should you have liked to kill him?” asked Mrs. Almond.

“Yes, very much.  I think it is quite possible that it is all a blind.”

“A blind?”

“An arrangement between them.  Il fait le mort, as they say in France; but he is looking out of the corner of his eye.  You can depend upon it he has not burned his ships; he has kept one to come back in.  When I am dead, he will set sail again, and then she will marry him.”

“It is interesting to know that you accuse your only daughter of being the vilest of hypocrites,” said Mrs. Almond.

“I don’t see what difference her being my only daughter makes.  It is better to accuse one than a dozen.  But I don’t accuse any one.  There is not the smallest hypocrisy about Catherine, and I deny that she even pretends to be miserable.”