say
"No," said Calgary, interrupting her. "I shall not say anything of the kind. It is my business, Hester. I agree with you. When you start a thing you have to go on with it. I feel that every bit as much as you do."
"Oh!" Colour flamed up into Hester's face. Suddenly, as was the way with her, she looked beautiful. "So I'm not alone," she said. "There is someone."
"Yes, my dear, there is someone - for what he's worth. So far I haven't been worth very much, but I'm trying and I've never stopped trying to help." He sat down and drew his chair nearer to her.
"Now tell me all about it," he said. "Has it been very bad?"
"It's one of us, you see," said Hester. "We all know that. Mr. Marshall came and we pretended it must have been someone who got in, but he
knew it wasn't. It's one of us."
"And your young man - what's-his-name?" "Don. Donald Craig. He's a doctor."
"Don thinks it's you?"
"He's afraid it's me," said Hester. She twisted her hands in a dramatic gesture. She looked at him. "Perhaps you think it's me, too?"
"Oh, no," said Calgary. "Oh no, I know quite well that you're innocent."
"You say that as though you were really quite sure." "I am quite sure," said Calgary. "But why? How can you be so sure?"
"Because of what you said to me when I left the house after telling all of you. Do you remember? What you said to me about innocence. You
couldn't have said that - you couldn't have felt that way - unless you were innocent."
"Oh," cried Hester. "Oh - the relief! To know there's someone who really feels like that!"
"So now," said Calgary, "we can discuss it calmly, can't we?" "Yes," said Hester. "It feels - it feels quite different now."
"Just as a matter of interest," said Calgary, "and keeping firmly in mind thatyou know what I feel about it, why should anyone for one moment think that you would kill your adopted mother?"
"I might have done," said Hester. "I often felt like it. One does sometimes feel just mad with rage. One feels so futile, so - so helpless. Mother was always so calm and so superior and knew everything, and
was right about everything. Sometimes I would think, 'Oh! I would like to kill her.'" She looked at him. "Do you understand? Didn't you ever feel like that when you were young?"
The last words gave Calgary a sudden pang, the same pang perhaps that he had felt when Micky in the hotel at Drymouth had said to him,
"You look older." When he was young? Did it seem so very long ago to Hester? He cast his mind back. He remembered himself at nine years old consulting with another small boy in the gardens of his prep school, wondering ingenuously what would be the best way to dispose
of Mr. Warborough, their form master. He remembered the
helplessness of rage that had consumed him when Mr. Warborough had been particularly sarcastic in his comments. That, he thought, was what Hester had felt too. But whatever he and young - what was his name now? - Porch, yes,
Porch had been the boy's name - although he and young Porch had consulted and planned, they had never taken any active steps to bring about the demise of Mr. Warborough.
"You know," he said to Hester, "you ought to have got over those sort of feelings a good many years ago. I can understand them, of course."
"It was just that Mother had that effect upon me," said Hester. "I'm beginning to see now, you know, that it was my own fault. I feel that if only she'd lived a little longer, just lived till I was a little older, a little more settled, that - that we'd have been friends in a curious way. That I'd have been glad of her help and her advice. But - but as it was I couldn't bear it; because, you see, it made me feel so ineffectual, so stupid. Everything I did went wrong and I could see for myself that the things I did were foolish things. That I'd only done them because I wanted to rebel, wanted to prove that I was myself. And I wasn't anybody. I was fluid. Yes, that's the word," said Hester. "It's exactly the word. Fluid. Never taking a shape for long. Just trying on shapes - shapes - shapes of other people that I admired. I thought, you see, if