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By Root 4527 0

you would have, could no longer evade having, to face one another, he alone would be enough and he would not require my ratification or support. No, it was the past itself which I had forgiven, could at last forgive now: swapped all that bitter and outraged impotence for the home-harbor-haven which was within the range of his capacities, which he was fitted and equipped for-more: would have Wednesday Night chosen himself if he had had the choice-whose instrument you in your anonymity had been whether you actually intended for it to be in France or not, where, since he was free of you, the two others of us could be also. Then his military class was called. He went almost eagerly-not that he could have done else, as I know, but then so do you know that there are ways and still ways of accepting what you have no choice of refusing. But he went almost eagerly and served his tour-I almost said time, but didn't I just say he went almost eagerly?--and came back home and then I believed that he was free of you-that you and he also had struck a balance, an armistice in liability and threat; he was a French citizen and a Frenchman now not only legally but morally too since the date of his birth proved his right to the one and he had just doffed the uniform in which he himself had proved his right and worthiness to the other; not only was he free of you but each of you was free now of the other: you absolved of the liability since, having given him life, you had now created for him security and dignity in which to end it and so you owed him nothing; he absolved of threat since you no longer harmed him now and so you didn't need to fear him any more.

Tes, free of you at last, or so I thought. Or you were free of him, that is, since he was the one who had better be afraid. If any minuscule of danger still remained for you in him, he himself would eradicate it now by the surest means of all: marriage, a wife and family; so many economic responsibilities to bear and discharge that he would have no time over to dream of his moral rights; a family, children: that strongest and most indissoluble bond of all to mesh him harmless forever more into his present and commit him irrevocably to his future and insulate him for good and always from the griefs and anguishes (he had none of course in the sense I mean because he still had never heard of you) of his past.

'But it seems that I was wrong. Wrong always in regard to you, wrong every time in what I thought you thought or felt or feared from him. Never more wrong than now, when apparently you had come to believe that bribing him with independence of you had merely scotched the snake, not killed it, and marriage would compound his threat to you in children, any one of which might prove impervious to the bribe of a farm. Any marriage, even this one. And at first it looked as if your own blood was trying to fend and shield you from this threat as though in a sort of instinctive filial loyalty. We had long ago designed marriage for him and, now that he was free, grown, a man, a citizen, heir to the farm because we-my husband and I-knew now that we would have no children, his military service forever (so we thought then) behind him, we began to plan one. Except that he refused twice, declined twice the candidates virtuous and solvent and suitable which we picked for him, and still in such a way that we could never tell if it was the girl he said no to or the institution. Perhaps both, being your son though as far as I know he still didn't know you even existed; perhaps both, having inherited both from you: the repudiation of the institution since his own origin had done without it; the finicky choosing of a partner, since with him once passion had had to be enough because it was all and he in his turn felt, desired, believed that he deserved, no less to match his own inheritance.

'Or was it even worse than that to you: your own son truly, demanding not even revenge on you but vengeance: refusing the two we picked who were not only solvent but virtuous too, for that one who had not even sold the