"I want to die," I said, anxious to put an end to our conversation. "I am sick of life; the past is a tangled skein which I cannot unravel. It is time that my eyes closed for ever—that the curtain fell!"
Poor Marie! Her remorse, her unrest, her dark moods were rooted in that shady past. In putting old events by the side of new ones I had the key to the quarrels between mother and daughter, brutal quarrels, frequently verging on violence. I could understand Marie's hitherto incomprehensible words, "I could kick my mother!"
