Until then Laurel had thought that perhaps she might ask her father. He liked talking about big things, about certain big things, that is—like beautiful music, and beautiful sunsets, and how wonderful nature is, and being honest and a good sportsman, and all that. But Laurel was shy with her father during the short periods she spent with him. She usually listened more than she talked. He always introduced the subject of their conversations. She’d sooner die in ignorance than to ask him a question that wasn’t “nice.”

Chapter 11

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1

WHEN HELEN MORRISON caught the timid, butterfly-like little creature that Laurel was at thirteen, in her soft deft hands, and cautiously lifted one scooped palm from over the other, as it were, and peered into the dark, domed chamber to see what sort of creature was there, her interest was instantly aroused. She had never seen a little-girl specimen of Laurel’s sort—so composed and self-possessed in speech and manner, so at home in smart, up-to-date frocks, so skilled in smart, up-to-date sports, so familiar with smart, up-to-date beauty-shop secrets—but underneath like a child who has lived on an island, alone somewhere, untold and untaught.

“She’s like a book I bought in Florence once,” Helen Morrison told Stephen one day, after Laurel had been visiting her. “It’s a beautifully bound book, in full leather, and hand-tooled, in old blue and gold. But its pages are blank. I bought it to write odd bits of poetry in. Yes. Laurel is a little like that—beautifully finished on the outside, but full of pages as white as snow that have never been written on.”

2

ON A SMALL table beside Helen Morrison’s bed there was a picture of a little girl whose pages also had never been written on. Often Helen Morrison would take the lovely little miniature of her dead child close to the strong light, and gaze at it hard and long, in a hungry attempt to recall how the soft cheek used to feel when she brushed her own against it, how the limp little body used to melt into her arms when she held it close.

It was a beautiful baby’s face that smiled back at Helen from out of the ivory, but it was always a baby’s face. That was the pity of it. What would she have looked like today? (Oh, never to know. Never to know!) What strength and confidence and beauty would that weak little body have attained? What strength and confidence and beauty would that spark of fine intelligence, shining so steadily in her baby’s face, have kindled under constant caring and tending? What had they both lost—this little daughter and herself, in way of rare companionship and human love?