His
children, Lee thought, his wife, the servants in the kitchen, none knew
him; he was a stranger to his own house.
If he had still, quite desperately, instinctively, looked to Helena and
Gregory for assistance, he had met a final failure. Brushed with
sleepiness they were slipping away from him. He was reluctant to have
them go, leave him; the distance between them and himself appeared to
widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He
wanted to call them back, "Helena and Gregory, Gregory!" But he
remained quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of
sleep, silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he was
facing.
Switching off the light he went into their playroom, scattered with
bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and
some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted.
Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having
been half cast aside. Gregory had wanted a typewriter; his jacket, at
dancing-school, had been belted like his, Lee Randon's. They each had,
in the lower hall, a bicycle on which they rode to and from school and
to play. "Will he need me later?" Lee asked himself; "or will it be the
same till the end?" But he had already decided that the latter was
infinitely better.
He lingered on the second floor, putting off from minute to minute the
unavoidable taking up of Fanny's demands.
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