Mary sobbed. “But I can’t go back to him.”
I think that here, if my grandmother gave her a chance, she probably did make one—or part of one—of the speeches that she long afterwards quoted to me.
She was intensely unhappy. Robert did not understand her, and she could not live in an unsympathetic atmosphere. She should go mad. All that she had ever asked of life was peace, beautiful surroundings, and the ideal companion.... If she went back to Robert now, after having found courage to make the break, it would be a repetition of the misery that had broken her heart during the past three years.
(The hearts of my mother and grandmother both suffered innumerable breakages throughout their lives, neither of them ever seeming aware of the physiological absurdity of the expression.)
“It’s braver to stay away than to go back and try and patch up something that can never be anything but a failure,” quavered Mary, with a momentary flash of insight.
But of course grandmother couldn’t leave it at that. She had the justification of her own existence to think of, for one thing. I am quite sure that a fortuitous street-musician, rendering “Santa Lucia” or “Silver Threads Amongst the Gold” in the distance, would have broken down Mary’s frail barrier of honest thought, and have materially assisted my grandmother to her victory. Accessories were so absolutely essentials, to them both.
But so far as I know, grandmother had to win on points, as it were, and received no extraneous help in the shape of sentimental appeals from without.
She made her supreme effort.
“For the boy’s sake, Mary ... your little, little boy. Is he to be motherless?”
“Wouldn’t Robert let me have him?”