Part Two - Massage Cream; Theme and Variations

But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue
by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Rémy de Gourmont, she
would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page,
that she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh
talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to
their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the
foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements
in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did
succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of
sexual mother-complexes. Eugenia found that instead of thrilling
voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and
bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was,
with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to
mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that
of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a
big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of
family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them
much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother
never could.

She found that such evocations of facts poignantly vital to her
personally, were devastatingly more troubling to her facial calm than
any most sickening picture in d'Annunzio's portrayal of small-town
humanity in which she was trying to take the proper, shocked interest.
Despite all her effort to remain tranquil she would guess by the stir of
her pulses that probably she had lost control of herself again, and
going to the mirror would catch her face all strained and tense in a
breathless suspense.