Free The Innocents by Margery Sharp

one saw that from being slender she had grown very thin, almost angular; so perhaps organizing galas was harder work than I’d imagined.
    At the sight of Antoinette’s cot extended by a piano-seat she appeared so appalled, I was only glad she hadn’t been able to picture it. Personally I had grown too used to the contrivance even to notice it as such, but I dare say to Cecilia it looked like some makeshift in a slum.
    â€œI could easily have got something bigger,” I hastened to explain. “In fact, I once did; but Antoinette’s very fond of her cot.”
    At that Cecilia smiled tolerantly.
    â€œSuch a babe, she was fond of Bridget too!—the Irish girl we had before Miss Swanson …”
    â€œMiss Swanson who was so completely qualified?” asked I.
    â€œWell, of course,” said Cecilia. “She cost the earth, but she was worth it.—Who told you about her?”
    â€œYou did,” said I. “That is, you mentioned her, the first time I saw Antoinette.”
    â€œWhat a memory!” exclaimed Cecilia. “Look, why not let’s go down again, and I’ll beg a coffee?”
    She was very restless. It was a sort of interruption to our talk I hadn’t bargained for.—Happening to glance out of the window, I moreover saw Antoinette and Mrs. Brewer prematurely returning. But I felt fairly sure Mrs. Brewer wouldn’t bring the child indoors, and having really no option in any case took Cecilia back to the sitting-room.
    It wasn’t coffee I offered her, but sherry; actually from the bottle I’d opened for Doctor Alice. I have to make my sherry last!—but I was anxious to ingratiate myself with Cecilia in every possible way. Yet the nettle had to be grasped, and as soon as she was seated again, I grasped it.
    â€œOf course you must realize,” said I, “Antoinette isn’t quite like other children?”
    Cecilia paused to take a cigarette from her beautiful gold case; then snapped open her lighter.
    â€œOf course she’s terribly shy …”
    I waited.
    â€œIf you mean almost mute—which isn’t in the least the same thing as retarded—she was already having speech-therapy tuition from Miss Swanson. Didn’t you hear me tell her father,” added Cecilia rather righteously, “we should have left her behind? By now she’d be talking quite normally—or at least could have told me hello!”
    I refrained from saying that Antoinette could additionally pronounce the words vermin, pepper, rucksack and tureen. Normal talk, that is, in Cecilia’s sense, social talk, had small use for any one of them, except possibly pepper, in alliance with smoked salmon; tureen has disappeared along with large Victorian families, rucksack is overspecialized and vermin altogether out of court.
    â€œI suppose we all make mistakes,” said I.
    â€œNot that I’m blaming you, not for a single moment,” Cecilia reassured me generously. “It’s just one of those things that sometimes seem to happen, and now we must just pick up the pieces.”
    Whereupon it developed that Antoinette, as soon as in New York, would not only be put into speech-therapy class again, but probably into analysis as well.—I looked over my shoulder into the garden; the artichoke-tops, though there was no wind, stirred a little, as though some small animal moved below. How to analyze mole or hedgehog, thought I, into any acceptably human behaviour? Yet I myself knew Antoinette not merely animal; all she needed to become fully human was simply time, and endless love, and endless patience, and no sudden uprooting—here I saw her as rather vegetable—from familiar ground …
    It was now more than ever that I missed Doctor Alice. I felt she was the only person who could have made Cecilia see reason—or rather who might have bullied Cecilia into behaving reasonably. If my friend had been alive, to say,