THE HARD-BOILED VIRGIN
the Atlantic Ocean and the German language were concealing the opinions of Sigmund Freud from Georgia, or for suspecting that some women can be mothers only by day and wives only by night, and when Katharine Faraday had a sore throat which would almost certainly become measles before the next morning, her little walnut bed was moved into the carefully curtained off bay-window of her mother’s room. But if Katharine Faraday had dared to risk escaping over its creaking rail, she would not have been lying in her bed when morning came, and her ears would not have been vainly stopped against her mother’s reproaches and against her father’s stumbling steps and his stumbling excuses. She did not like to feel the emotion she did not know was called pity, and she did not understand how her father could have reached such age and such eminence without learning that all mothers are as infallible as any pope and more righteous than any saint. Neither did she understand why he had never learned that wise husbands and children acknowledge their sins immediately, and acknowledge them with such despair and such moving lamentations that
10
