“What has come over you, Eva? Who has been poisoning your mind?” Lady Carey’s voice was trembling, and she did not dare look at her daughter. The latter impulsively fell on her knees, and encircling her mother’s waist with her arms, she said passionately,—
“You believed us to be safe when you had told us never to look inside a certain closet; and like Blue Beard you fed us on kick-shaws and soap-bubbles as long as we never opened that secret closet—life. Why were we not to know the realities of existence? Why did you travesty life into a Music Hall burlesque? What God created, you belittled; what nature gave to man, you turned into a deadly weapon against him. Love came into the world, pure and generous, but it was led astray in social haunts and became debauchery; ambition prompted man to create something true and beautiful, but he wandered in trimmed paths of artificiality, and his natural instinct was transformed into a passion for worldly power and riches. What you called character was merely callousness erected into a principle; what you thought was philosophy was only an abnormal power of frivolity, which would have made even a butterfly blush. Oh! mother, mother, cannot you see what a sham it all was?”
Lady Carey was not unintelligent; she knew that what her daughter said was perfectly correct. She quite realised that this was what they had lived through, but she did not approve of the spirit of revolt, and always had considered it vulgar to kick against the rules of Society. Still, her opposition was not altogether sincere, and her displeasure did not arise at what her daughter said, but at the fact of her daughter saying it. Had Lionel, or any other, put forward these ideas, she would have been the first to laugh, and to agree with what he said.
“Forgive me, dearest mother, for saying these cruel things to you, but if you only knew how much I love, you could not blame me. Set me free, my own mother! After all, it is my life I am pleading for, and I am willing to take the responsibility of all that will follow.”
“This influence which has such an effect upon you all must be very powerful.” Tears were slowly dropping from Lady Carey’s eyes and trickling down her cheeks. “Can it be that I have never known you really, Eva? How is it that for many years I have looked after you—for I have not, like so many, been neglectful of my maternal duties—and yet know no more to-day about your nature than I did on the day you were born? For the last few years, since you were presented, we have lived the same life, seen the same people, and yet we were as much divided from each other as if you had been at the North Pole.”