"Why not?" It was the oldest form of dispute they had, Jean quoting her mother's own words and Martha insisting the cases were not the same. "It is the same, exactly. You're not well, or else you're getting lazy. Which is it? It must be one."
"Not at all. You're just talking to hear yourself, Jeany. You always were fond of that silly arguing that pins people down to a yes or no."
"Oh, mummy, you're such a fake. You get so terribly philosophic when you want to slip out of a thing. But now listen to me. I won't scold you any more. But I'm going to watch you precisely as if you were a 'case' and I'll give you till the tenth of July and not one day longer. If you look the way you do now you're going to the country, if I have to take you there by force. Do you hear?"
Martha smiled. "Yes, dear, I hear."
It was an afternoon at the end of June and Martha and Jean were in the clean, darkened kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. Bees buzzed in the garden outside and the old pine was sweetly fragrant in the warmth. There was something very positive and real about this peace and clean orderliness, so that Jean wondered whether, after all, this silent strength was an accident of her mother's nature, or whether the quiet little figure, trotting on its mechanical round of duty, had not achieved it, at perhaps a price no one guessed.
Jean watched her as she beat up a pan of the tea biscuits that no remonstrance of Jean's had been able to stop.
"I'd have to make something for supper and I might just as well make these."
And as always she had her way. Jean listened to the bees and watched the deft hands at their work. It was so precisely as it had always been and yet somehow it was different. Jean's mind wandered lazily about the problem. What was different? Why did it no longer annoy her? It had once.
She remembered the day of graduation when all her fine enthusiasm to fill her life with work and beauty had died at the sight of Martha dishing up the roast. And the day when she had heard of the library work and Martha had gone on making apple pies. And now she was making tea biscuits and pretending that nothing was the matter with her, when Jean could see that it was a strain to lift the heavy mixing bowl and that tiny drops of perspiration appeared at the corners of Martha's mouth. She was ill and no doubt she knew it.
Jean got up and took the mixing bowl away from her.