Possession Read Online Free Page A

couldn’t bear to think that she was going to get anything but the very, very best.”
    There it was again—this putting of my family on a pedestal which they may or may not be able to live up to. Sarah is a lovely girl, certainly, but she has her failings; and plenty of lovely girls have missed out on marriage by being too choosy during the few short years when choice is at its peak. Besides….
    “I just know I shall like him,” I said; and proceeded to explain to Cissie the reasons for my confidence. That I could trust Sarah’s judgement; that she was old enough to make her own decisions; that her letter had sounded so happy and confident. How could I not be going to like him?
    But what, exactly, did I mean by “like”? Looking back, I have to conclude that it was simple cupboard-love: here was a young man who was going to provide us with an escape from all our current worries about Sarah. At a single blow he was going to rid us of all those long-haired, soul-obsessed students who had hitherto sucked like starving leeches at our daughter’s warm-hearted and generous nature, trying to drain it away into the arid deserts of their threadbare “creativity”, and coming back for more. Who has ever worried about whether she is going to like St George, as he gallops up on his white charger?
    And then, too, there was my position in the Cat-Race to be considered. I imagined ringing up all these people, all over again, to tell them that it was all off; and I felt physically sick.
    “I can trust Sarah’s judgement absolutely,” was how Isummed all this up aloud; and Cissie seemed pacified. She even praised the closeness of the mother-daughter relationship which rendered such certainty possible; and after a few more remarks equally soothing to my maternal spirit she rang off.
    I had been aware for some time that Janice was hovering about, listening to it all; now, at the “ping” of the replaced receiver, she hurled herself into the situation.
    “ I agree with Cissie!” she challenged me. “I think it’s awful, the way you’re telling everyone how marvellous Mervyn is when you’ve never seen him, you don’t know anything about him!”
    “I know that Sarah loves him, and that’s enough!” I snapped at her. “And so it should be for you! For Sarah’s sake we ought to be prepared to accept him whatever he’s like!”
    “Even if he’s a dwarf?” said Janice viciously. “Or humpbacked ? Something you can’t show off to your precious friends?”
    “ Janice !” I did not attempt to delve into the intensity of pain, or dread, which must lie behind such an outburst. Janice had already annoyed me past endurance by her generally wet-blanketing attitude to her sister’s joyful news. If she was jealous or upset, she would just have to get over it; one can’t be coddling teenage feelings all the time.
    “Janice! That’s a horrible thing to say! Your own sister! Why should you suppose….”
    I stopped. Ridiculous though Janice’s suggestion had been, it had nevertheless touched into life in me some deep level of superstition which I am not normally aware of. I dared not finish the sentence for fear of tempting Providence. For, truly, it was not impossible to suppose that Sarah might, in a spirit of protective pity, choose a partner with some grave defect. That same quality of unstinted generosity that had drawn towards her all those starveling neurotics, might now be leading her to….
    “Ridiculous!” I stormed at Janice. “How can you saysuch things? If you ever dare speak to me like that again….!”
    “Oh, Mummy! Come off it! I didn’t mean it seriously.” Janice seemed half-scared herself by now, anxious to quell the storm she had so deliberately raised. “I’m sorry, Mummy, it’s just that it annoys me so, the way you talk to each other, all you mothers. You sound so childish, all of you….” At the lordly age of seventeen, Janice was very free with such rebukes, and like most mothers of my