“Robert, I want you not to ask me to play the piano to-night.”
(He so seldom gave her an opening, that she had to force them.)
“Off colour?”
“It isn’t that. I heard to-day that Mrs. Thorndyke’s child is dead. It—it upset me.”
“But you didn’t know the child.”
“I know Katherine Thorndyke.”
“You’ve met her once or twice, I remember. And didn’t we hear that if the poor child had lived, it must have been an idiot?”
Probably, at that stage, my mother burst into tears. She’d been heading for that, of course, although she didn’t know it consciously. But my father did, and had made her aware that he did, in a rather brutal fashion.
That was the way they reacted on one another.
It was better, after grandmother came. Curiously enough, my father liked her, although she and Mary had so many of the same characteristics. But I think he regarded her as a sort of lightning conductor.