Kaleidoscope Read Free Page A

wants us to go—all of us, me and our daughter, she’s five—wants us to go there to
live
.” Tears were running down her cheeks now. “He’s out almost every night and—” She burst into tears. “I’m scared.”
    â€œYes,” said Madame Karitska. “Yes, you would be. May I have something of yours to hold?”
    â€œMine! But it’s Arthur—I mean Alpha—I hoped you could explain.”
    â€œIn a moment, yes,” she assured her. “But it helps me to know you as well.”
    With some effort the girl removed the ring on her left hand with its tiny diamond, then brought out a handkerchief and blew her nose.
    Closing her eyes Madame Karitska stilled her mind and opened herself to the vibrations and feelings that the ring had accumulated from its years of being worn. She rejected the negatives one by one—the emanations of dreariness and monotony and routine— and was surprised and pleased to reach below these to something so promising. “I wonder,” she said, opening her eyes, “if you realize you have a very real talent in art. Do you sketch? Paint?”
    The girl turned scarlet. “Oh, Alpha doesn’t allow—” She stopped, flustered yet looking pleased. “Do you really think I have
talent
for it?”
    Madame Karitska nodded. “You do sketch, then.”
    Looking frightened, and then defiant, the girl brought from her purse a small sheet of paper. “I burn them usually but I can’t stop, it’s what keeps me going. It doesn’t look like much,” she said, and handed it across the table.
    Madame Karitska looked at it, and to her surprise tears rose in her eyes. It was a simple line drawing of a child’s face, very free, very spontaneous and fresh, the nose, brows, and lips only suggested, the eyes luminous and wondering. “Oh my dear,” she said, deeply touched.
    The girl looked at her in surprise. “You think it’s good?”
    â€œExquisite. You have the gift of rejecting the unimportant and seeing the essence, a gift that comes naturally to only the best. And the way the lines flow . . .” She smiled at the girl. “I’m delighted to have met you.”
    â€œYou really think—But Alpha . . .”
    She was not ready for it, of course, realized Madame Karitska; her attention was concentrated totally on her husband, it had been demanded of her, and she was not accustomed to thinking of herself. Madame Karitska handed back the ring and picked up Arthur’s—or Alpha’s, as he preferred to be called now, and she sighed a little, wondering how women could so rashly turn their selves over to such unpromising men. There was really nothing unpleasant about Alpha, she found, her eyes closed, but she received no sense of real character or stability, a man loosely held together by rules, compulsion, the needs of wife and children, ambitious but lacking the discipline to fulfill those ambitions: a dreamer . . . some charm, of course, but weak. He so obviously dominated his wife that she would be shocked to learn how malleable he really was.
    She opened her eyes, very serious now. “I can tell you very little of what you want to know, except that I feel very strongly that you face a very, very difficult decision.”
    â€œWhat?” the girl asked despairingly.
    â€œYour husband, I feel . . .” She hesitated and then, “No, I must be blunt. I feel that you will lose your husband whether you go with him to this Guardian of Eden home or not. I don’t mean to be melodramatic— perhaps you cannot even understand it, or why—but he has already given himself over to them. His sense of self, perhaps even his soul.”
    â€œYou mean . . . he’ll insist our little girl and I must go?”
    â€œI feel that you will have to choose,” Madame Karitska said gently. “Choose between the Guardians of Eden and your