Free Elders and Betters by Ivy Compton-Burnett

proportion to his effort; his personal means were small; and he was glad of his wife’s portion and of her sister’s help to his household. Thomas hated shift and straitness, and loved the formal and complete, and betrayed himself more than he knew, when he said, as he often did, that to him his house was home.
    â€œIs your mother well to-day, my dear, and your aunt as usual, and Terence doing what he can?”
    Tullia went into her light mirth.
    â€œThat is how it all is. It is a fair summing-up of the situation.”
    â€œYou must throw off the troubles that are not yours, my child. It is not fair that you should carry them. Your own will come in time.”
    Tullia did not say, perhaps hardly knew, that this was her natural method.
    â€œSuch a line is not appreciated in the eldest daughter.”
    â€œIt is wrong to assign certain burdens to certain places.”
    â€œI did not mean that I could not steer my own course. I only meant that it was marked and silently condemned.”
    â€œWell, repay silence with silence,” said Thomas. “It is a thing that seldom merits anything else. And I hope great things of the coming reunion. The brother and sisters are so bound up in each other, that even their children seem apart. They should have been able to reproduce like some lower forms of life, by means of pieces broken off themselves.”
    â€œI am glad I am not made only of Donne material. The best of two people is better than the whole of one, and there is always a chance of it.”
    â€œThe chance worked out well for me, my Tullia, and ina life that would have gone ill without it. I am not saying that I would go back and turn its course, but a life sentence is a solemn thing. I talked of the lower forms of life, but I was thinking of the higher. Some of us develop too far, and do not find a place. They turn to others of their kind or back on themselves.”
    â€œWe are all subject to the failings of over-civilisation,” said Tullia, willing to share in these. “Unless the two children are an exception.”
    â€œBless them both,” said Thomas, in an emotional tone; “They should not suffer from themselves. A little from others they are already suffering. That is why I let them go their own way. It is not that I feel that children should be left alone, as much as I feel that these should. Supervision would mean too much watching, too much searching, too much love. So far no problems arise.”
    â€œAnd the poor parent is so used to problems, that he can hardly manage without them,” said Tullia, with the readiness to leave the depths, that her mother found unsatisfying, and her father a rest and charm. “We must find some for him, and I don’t suppose we shall have far to seek. Indeed some seem to be approaching at the moment.”
    These were doing so in the person of Susan Donne, who was coming from the house with the aid of a stick and the arm of her brother. She was taller and fairer and more statuesque than her sister, and the enforced caution of her movements rendered her easy to observe at a glance. She was the youngest and the comeliest and the most regarded of the Donnes, and her tendency to autocracy and self-esteem had been fostered and responded to the treatment. An affection of the heart that defied cure, increased and excused these qualities, and the life of her sister’s house was not easier for her presence. She saw her material help as more important than it was, felt it justified more than it did, and felt that her personal tragedy justified anything. So it came about that she walked alone in the valley of theshadow, as she often described herself as doing, though without knowing that she spoke the truth. This force and feebleness in her personality laid their spell on other people and threw her up on her own plane, and they lifted their eyes to a creature immune and apart. But through it all there ran the current of her human