, which are sham. Richard still keeps his gaze close upon me. I will not meet it. He is reckless, teasing, threatening: I choose not to understand. Perhaps I am weak, after all. Perhaps, as he and my uncle believe, I draw a pleasure from torment. It is certainly a torment to me now, to sit at a lesson with him, to sit at a dinner-table with him, to read to him, at night, from my uncle''s books. It begins to be a torment, too, to pass time with Sue. Our routines are spoiled. I am too conscious that she waits, as he does: I feel her watching, gauging, willing me on. Worse, she begins to speak in his behalf—to tell me, bluntly, how clever he is, how kind and interesting.
''You think so, Sue?'' I ask her, my eyes upon her face; and her gaze might flutter uneasily away, but she will always answer: ''Yes, miss. Oh, yes, miss. Anyone would say it, wouldn''t they?''
Then she will make me neat—always neat, handsome and neat— she will take down my hair and dress it, straighten seams, lift lint from the fabric of my gowns. I think she does it as much to calm
herself, as to calm me. ''There,'' she will say, when she has finished. ''Now you are better.''—Now she is better, she means. ''Now your brow is smooth. How creased it was, before! It mustn''t be creased—''
It mustn''t be creased, for Mr Rivers''s sake: I hear the unspoken words, my blood surges again; I take her arm in mine and pinch it.