You can see things so much more clearly when you stand off at a distance like this, you know, than you can when you are close to them!

She broke down and cried when she spoke of the divorce, and of the influence it had upon me, and of the false idea of marriage it gave me.  She said it was the worst kind of thing for me—­the sort of life I had to live.  She said I grew pert and precocious and worldly-wise, and full of servants’ talk and ideas.  She even spoke of that night at the little cafe table when I gloried in the sparkle and spangles and told her that now we were seeing life—­real life.  And of how shocked she was, and of how she saw then what this thing was doing to me.  But it was too late.

She told more, much more, about the later years, and the reconciliation; then, some way, she brought things around to Jerry and me.  Her face flushed up then, and she didn’t meet my eyes.  She looked down at her sewing.  She was very busy turning a hem just so.

She said there had been a time, once, when she had worried a little about Jerry and me, for fear we would—­separate.  She said that she believed that, for her, that would have been the very blackest moment of her life; for it would be her fault, all her fault.

I tried to break in here, and say, “No, no,” and that it wasn’t her fault; but she shook her head and wouldn’t listen, and she lifted her hand, and I had to keep still and let her go on talking.  She was looking straight into my eyes then, and there was such a deep, deep hurt in them that I just had to listen.

She said again that it would be her fault; that if I had done that she would have known that it was all because of the example she herself had set me of childish willfulness and selfish seeking of personal happiness at the expense of everything and everybody else.  And she said that that would have been the last straw to break her heart.

But she declared that she was sure now that she need not worry.  Such a thing would never be.

I guess I gasped a little at this.  Anyhow, I know I tried to break in and tell her that we were going to separate, and that that was exactly what I had come into the room in the first place to say.

But again she kept right on talking, and I was silenced before I had even begun.

She said how she knew it could never be—­on account of Eunice.  That I would never subject my little girl to the sort of wretchedly divided life that I had had to live when I was a child.

(As she spoke I was suddenly back in the cobwebby attic with little Mary Marie’s diary, and I thought—­what if it were Eunice—­writing that!)

She said I was the most devoted mother she had ever known; that I was too devoted, she feared sometimes, for I made Eunice all my world, to the exclusion of Jerry and everything and everybody else.  But that she was very sure, because I was so devoted, and loved Eunice so dearly, that I would never deprive her of a father’s love and care.