Read Online Thank Heaven Fasting by E. M. Delafield - Free Book Online

unpleasant facts, his eager desire for affection, and his utter inability to compel it.
    He, like his wife, felt slightly ashamed that both the children should be girls, and during their early childhood he found the physical side of their existence, so inevitably stressed in nursery days, unpleasantly obtrusive.
    Just before Cecily’s sixth birthday her father fell ill with influenza. He was not very ill—nevertheless he died. He left everything to his wife—his money, the house in Belgrave Square, and the place in Yorkshire. There was no mention of his children in the will since neither was a boy.
    Lady Marlowe let the place in Yorkshire and lived in the Belgrave Square house. Frederica and Cecily had a French mademoiselle, who taught them to speak and write French, and with whom they read and reread the stories of Mme. de Ségur and Mlle. Zenaide Fleuriot, because Mademoiselle said that nothing else was proper for young girls—and a children’s maid, who brushed their hair, bathed them, and dressed and undressed them, exactly as she had done in their childhood, until both were well on in their teens.
    Their mother’s authority was supreme. No one in the house was allowed to question it, but Frederica and Cecily least of all. If Frederica sometimes, in what her mother referred to as “the difficult age,” made occasional clumsy and defiant attempts at self-assertion, they were met with such open ridicule that she could not persist in them. She was both too hyper-sensitive and too ill-adjusted to find any means of retaliation. Her violent and unformulated resentment of her mother’s tyranny reacted upon Cecily, who hadthus a double yoke to bear: that of Lady Marlowe’s cheerful bullying, and that of Frederica’s morbid and possessive love.
    Cecily was, however, the less unhappy of the two. The vitality that in Frederica was suppressed and distorted, in Cecily was reduced to a minimum, so that her life was almost entirely mental. Where Frederica yearned fiercely for normal contacts with humanity and life, Cecily longed for the education that had been almost wholly denied to her, and sought refuge from all that was unendurable in her life in abstract speculation and pathetic, surreptitious delvings into such sources of learning as she could attain to in secret.
    Both girls bore an immense and unacknowledged sense of guilt always with them, since both practised continual deceptions, ranging from direct lies to subtle reservations and implications, in regard to one another and to their parent. They were never, indeed, frank with anyone—Cecily because she unconsciously sought to safeguard herself against life by avoiding personal contacts, and Frederica because bitterness so distorted her vision that she could scarcely distinguish the false from the true.
    They had never been friendly with other girls, but Mrs. Ingram’s gentle insistence in forcing Monica upon them had led to a certain degree of familiarity between the three.
    They talked more or less freely, in the Belgrave Square schoolroom or in the back half of Mrs. Ingram’s drawing-room, which Monica was allowed to use as a sitting-room in the mornings.
    Towards the end of Monica’s first season she began, almost imperceptibly, to adopt an air of faint superiority towards Frederica. Not towards Cecily, for Cecily was too meek to provoke one to superiority. She would have taken the superiority of almost anybody for granted.
    â€œFancy, that Mr. Pelham that I met here, asks me to dance at every single ball I see him at. I danced with him twice on Tuesday, at the Corrys’.”
    â€œHe’s very dull though, isn’t he?” said Frederica.
    â€œOh, I don’t think so. Of course he’s rather old, but I don’t mind that a bit. I rather like elderly men; they’re easier to talk to, I think.”
    â€œMr. Pelham is supposed to have proposed to five different girls, and they all