Thus he explained himself somewhat lamely, with a consciousness that what he was saying must sound very strange to her. What did Helen know about his plans, or whether it was foolish or not, and why should he have explained it to her? It alarmed her as much as everything else in the strange and terrible imbroglio through which she could see no light.
“Poor! And you think it is inconsistent with poverty that I should buy a few miserable bits of wood? You have made great progress lately, Helen, to permit yourself to sit in judgment on your father.”
She looked at him piteously, with an appeal in her face. “I don’t know about it, papa; how can I know, or how can I sit in judgment? Will you please not tell me anything? Because I don’t understand, and then it looks as if I understood.”
“It seems to me you are no better than a fool, Helen.” But when he had said this he went away, and relieved her from the pressure of the new burden to which she was so unaccustomed. The excuse, the apology conveyed in his explanations, gave her a sense of confused misery, incongruity, impossibility, which was almost the worst of all. Oh, why had he ever told her anything? Why had he raised her against her will into that position in which she was forced more or less to judge against her will? She sat, when he had gone, at the window of the little room up-stairs, which was the best room in the Lion d’Or. The white curtains, it need not be said, were fixed fast as if they were glued to the window. To draw them aside would have been more terrible to Madame Dupré than to break a moral law; the one might have been condoned by public opinion, but the other! Helen sat within the primly fixed muslin which veiled all the world without, and sometimes shed a few tears quietly, while she made an attempt to mend Janey’s frock. It was not a handicraft she understood, but at least she could fasten the two gaping sides of a rent together, and that was always some good.