so often and with such vigor. She would simply repeat, "No. When I am ready, I will tell you. I am going to rest for a time."
It was her contentment that clearly had the power of disturbing Rebecca. She seemed at times almost happy. The old wilfulness and caprice were gone, and when she sat at the piano with Jean, there were times when it even seemed that she was enveloped by a hard, bright gaiety, touched, it is true, by hysteria and bitterness. She was unmanageable in a way she had never been.
"You are deceiving me," Rebecca reproached her. "There is something that I don't know. You are keeping something from me." And she would grow tearful and descend to the rich depths of Oriental sentiment. "Me," she would repeat, beating her thin breast, "who have given my life for you . . . who have worked myself to the bone . . . given all my time. . . . For no other reason than to make you a success. It is shameful."
And Ellen, in her new wisdom, might have answered, "Because you have found the thing you were born to do. Because you were aimless till you fastened upon me. . . . Because you found happiness in taking possession of me and my life."
But she said none of these things because it seemed to her that quarreling was useless. She only laughed and replied, "And you told the most wonderful lies about me. . . . You created Lilli Barr but Lilli Barr is having a rest now. I am being myself . . . Ellen Tolliver . . . for a little time."
Still Rebecca, too wise to be put off with such answers, only looked at her with suspicion and remained sulky. She could not run off now to visit Uncle Otto and Aunt Lina in Vienna nor the aunt in Riga nor the cousins in Trieste. She could not even make a round of the watering places, for all those which were not closed or filled with wounded soldiers lay on the other side of the circus parade that had begun to draw near to the end. One could almost hear the distant toots of the steam calliope, manned and manipulated by politicians, that fetched up the rear.
