The Heel of Achilles

She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been “poor little thing,” but Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on saying to one another that “the child will be a comfort to poor Mary.” Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely, ever since she could remember anything at all.

Once her mother had read her some extracts of old letters from her dead father, letters which had once come so regularly every week in thin blue envelopes with the Hong Kong postmark.

“Kiss our baby Lydia for me. I hope she is a good little thing always ... some day, when these years of hard work are over, you won’t have to sacrifice yourself any more, my poor Mary....” And, later on, in the last letter of all: “The child’s life is only a continuation of ours, my Mary.”

Long afterwards, Lydia, who never forgot the words, came to see them as the expression of man’s eternal wistful attempt to live on in the generation supplanting his own, but when her mother read them aloud to her, in a voice choked with tears, something in Lydia revolted violently.

“My life is my own,” she thought stubbornly, “not just a continuation of somebody else’s.”

With that acute clarity of vision that enabled her to analyze certain aspects of her childhood’s world with such astonishing maturity, she once told herself:

“They don’t love me for myself at all. Grandpapa doesn’t love me the least bit—he doesn’t love anybody. And mother loves me because I’m her child, and the aunts love me because I’m father’s child, and they think I’m a comfort to mother.”

She could hardly remember her father, and though at first she had shed tears over his death, Lydia had quickly dried them.

“Now, dear, you must be a good little girl and not cry and make poor mother more unhappy than she is already,” had said harassed-looking Aunt Evelyn. “You know you must think of her now. You’ll have to be her comfort.”