She is niether laughing nor crying now. If any angel is hovering before her marital door he hasn't a finger over his lips, but a hand clenched firmly over his mouth, and is accompanied by two others: One covering eyes, one covering ears. There are things one doesn't want to know, particularly if one is a woman, thus superstitious and believing in ghosts.
Coincidences abound, have always abounded, in her life, beknownst or not to her. And her husband hasn't the slightest ability to lie, nor to keep things from her. He always tells her everything eventually. It is one of the things she loves about him.
So it is now, years from a dawn like night and a day that yawned like a great grey grave before a melancholy that to-day seems piddling. So it is, going through the bundles of rags to get a nappy for Petit Jean, that she finds the thing that starts it.
It is a handkerchief. There are rusty stains upon it, and the initials UF. She remembers a joke from long ago and knows it was in her husband's keeping, and wonders how it came to this ignominious end.
When she asks him he pales and stammers, and finally, he tells her about the girl with the wound on the barricade, and in spite of how her tried to help her, how she came to that untimely end. It is all very heartbreaking, and then he tells her the girl's name.
He is pale and loves her, does her husband, his concern for her expression encircles her but does not understand how deep the pond of memory goes, nor how big the pebble might be. For all she is shaken, neither does she, really.
She presses the bloody handkerchief to her mouth and tries to decide if she really, truly feels that Eponine deserved it.
Coincidences abound, have always abounded, in her life, beknownst or not to her. And her husband hasn't the slightest ability to lie, nor to keep things from her. He always tells her everything eventually. It is one of the things she loves about him.
So it is now, years from a dawn like night and a day that yawned like a great grey grave before a melancholy that to-day seems piddling. So it is, going through the bundles of rags to get a nappy for Petit Jean, that she finds the thing that starts it.
It is a handkerchief. There are rusty stains upon it, and the initials UF. She remembers a joke from long ago and knows it was in her husband's keeping, and wonders how it came to this ignominious end.
When she asks him he pales and stammers, and finally, he tells her about the girl with the wound on the barricade, and in spite of how her tried to help her, how she came to that untimely end. It is all very heartbreaking, and then he tells her the girl's name.
He is pale and loves her, does her husband, his concern for her expression encircles her but does not understand how deep the pond of memory goes, nor how big the pebble might be. For all she is shaken, neither does she, really.
She presses the bloody handkerchief to her mouth and tries to decide if she really, truly feels that Eponine deserved it.