Any paid Irish nurse could
do for them what their mother bent the priceless treasure of her
temperament to accomplish. The Irish nurse would do it better, for she
would not be aware of anything else better, which she might do, and
their mother knew well enough what she sacrificed . . . or if she did not
know it yet, she would, soon. She had betrayed that to him, the very
first time he had seen her, that astonishing first day, when, breathing
out her vivid charm like an aureole of gold mist, she had sat there
before him, quite simply the woman most to his taste he had even seen
. . . _here_! That day when she had spoken about the queerness of her
feeling "lost" when little Mark went off to school, because for the
first time in years she had had an hour or so free from those ruthless
little leeches who spent their lives in draining her vitality. He had
known, if she had not, the significance of that feeling of hers, the
first time she had had a moment to raise her eyes from her trivial task
and see that she had been tricked into a prison. That very day he had
wanted to cry out to her, as impersonally as one feels towards a
beautiful bird caught in a net, "Now, _now_, burst through, and spread
your wings where you belong."
It was like wiping up the floor with cloth of gold.
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