looks about him. ''Come, what have we that is cool, hmm?''
He has a slim brass knife, blunt-edged, for cutting pages. He stoops and puts the blade of it against my face. His manner is mild, and frightens me. His voice is soft as a girl''s. He says, ''I am sorry to see you hurt, Maud. Indeed I am. Do you suppose I want you harmed? Why should I want that? It is you who must want it, since you provoke it so. I think you must like to be struck.—That is cooler, is it not?'' He has turned the blade. I shiver. My bare arms
creep with cold. He moves his mouth. ''All waiting,'' he repeats, ''on your good manners. Well, we are good at that, at Briar. We can wait, and wait, and wait again. Mrs Stiles and my staff are paid to do it; I am a scholar, and inclined to it by nature. Look about you here, at my collection. Do you suppose this the work of an impatient man? My books come to me slowly, from obscure sources. I have contentedly passed many tedious weeks in expectation of poorer volumes than you!'' He laughs, a dry laugh that might once have been moist; moves the point of the knife to a spot beneath my chin; tilts up my face and looks it over. Then he lets the knife fall, and moves away. He tucks the wires of his spectacles behind his ears.
''I advise you to whip her, Mrs Stiles,'' he says, ''if she prove troublesome again.''
Perhaps children are like horses after all, and may be broken. My uncle returns to his mess of papers, dismissing us; and I go docilely back to my sewing. It is not the prospect of a whipping that makes me meek. It is what I know of the cruelty of patience. There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged. I have seen lunatics labour at endless tasks—conveying sand from one leaking cup into another; counting the stitches in a fraying gown, or the motes in a sunbeam; filling invisible ledgers with the resulting sums. Had they been gentlemen, and rich—instead of women—then perhaps they would have passed as scholars and commanded staffs.—I cannot say. And of course, these are thoughts that come to me later, when I know the full measure of my uncle''s particular mania. That day, in my childish way, I glimpse only its surface. But I see that it is dark, and know that it is silent—indeed, its substance is the substance of the darkness and the silence which fills my uncle''s house like water or like wax.