Read After the Fireworks for Free Online Page B

I’m never on. So you see.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But I’m sure,” he added, “you never paid much attention to her disapproval.”
    â€œNone,” she answered, playing the un-good part for all it was worth. “I read Freud this spring,” she boasted, “and Gide’s autobiography, and Krafft-Ebbing. . . .”
    â€œWhich is more than I’ve ever done,” he laughed.
    The laugh encouraged her. “Not to mention all your books, years ago. You see,” she added, suddenly fearful lest she might have said something to offend him, “my mother never minded my reading your books. I mean, she really encouraged me, even when I was only seventeen or eighteen. My mother died last year,” she explained. There was asilence. “I’ve lived with Aunt Edith ever since,” she went on. “Aunt Edith’s my father’s sister. Older than he was. Father died in 1923.”
    â€œSo you’re all alone now?” he questioned. “Except, of course, for Aunt Edith.”
    â€œWhom I’ve now left.” She was almost boasting again. “Because when I was twenty-one . . .”
    â€œYou stuck out your tongue at her and ran away. Poor Aunt Edith!”
    â€œI won’t have you being sorry for her,” Pamela answered hotly. “She’s really awful, you know. Like poor Joan’s husband in The Return of Eurydice. ” How easy it was to talk to him!
    â€œSo you even know,” said Fanning, laughing, “what it’s like to be unhappily married. Already. Indissolubly wedded to a virtuous Aunt.”
    â€œNo joke, I can tell you. I’m the one to be sorry for. Besides, she didn’t mind my going away, whatever she might say.”
    â€œShe did say something then?”
    â€œOh, yes. She always says things. More in sorrow than in anger, you know. Like head-mistresses. So gentle and good, I mean. When all the time she really thought me too awful. I used to call her Hippo, because she was such a hypocrite— and so fat. Enormous. Don’t you hate enormous people? No, she’s really delighted to get rid of me,” Pamela concluded, “simply delighted.” Her face was flushed and as though luminously alive; she spoke with a quick eagerness.
    â€œWhat a tremendous hurry she’s in,” he was thinking, “to tell me all about herself. If she were older or uglier, whatan intolerable egotism it would be! As intolerable as mine would be if I happened to be less intelligent. But as it is . . .” His face, as he listened to her, expressed a sympathetic attention.
    â€œShe always disliked me,” Pamela had gone on. “Mother too. She couldn’t abide my mother, though she was always sweetly hippo-ish with her.”
    â€œAnd your mother—how did she respond?”
    â€œWell, not hippoishly, of course. She couldn’t be that. She treated Aunt Edith—well, how did she treat Aunt Edith?” Pamela hesitated, frowning. “Well, I suppose you’d say she was just natural with the Hippo. I mean . . .” She bit her lip. “Well, if she ever was really natural. I don’t know. Is anybody natural?” She looked up questioningly at Fanning. “Am I natural, for example?”
    Smiling a little at her choice of an example, “I should think almost certainly not,” Fanning answered, more or less at random.
    â€œYou’re right, of course,” she said despairingly, and her face was suddenly tragic, almost there were tears in her eyes. “But isn’t it awful? I mean, isn’t it simply hopeless?”
    Pleased that his chance shot should have gone home, “At your age,” he said consolingly, “you can hardly expect to be natural. Naturalness is something you learn, painfully, by trial and error. Besides,” he added, “there are some people who are unnatural by nature.”
    â€œUnnatural by nature.”