But these were purely physical things.  It was a certain mental relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it.  He only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand.  For years his mother had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out, tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder.  Lil seemed miraculously to understand about those things.  He liked, for example, a certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf clubs.  It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties.  Ma Mandle, tidying up, used to throw away that rag in horror.  Sometimes he would rescue it, crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust.  Sometimes he would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old.  Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it.  For that matter, she had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face and throat.  It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot.  She used to search remote corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space.  Lil knew about not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too.  Ma Mandle, at breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that had spoiled overnight in the icebox.  A shame!  Sometimes he had wanted to say, “Let me read my paper in peace, won’t you!” But he never had.  Now it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle’s small grievances, and Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines.

If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told you that you were insane.  If you had told her that she was jealous she would have denied it, furiously.  But both were true.

When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well.

“You don’t need to think you have to bring your old mother anything,” she would say, unreasonably.

“Didn’t I always bring you something, Ma?”

If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked.

Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, well-shod, immaculate.  Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly.  “Are you going out?”

“Just to market.  I thought I’d start early, before everything was picked over.”

“Oh—­to market!  I thought you were going to a party, you’re so dressy.”

In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly.  “Oh, no,” she had said.  “This is your household now.”