She shook her head. "No, I don't remember her, and Father has never spoken of her."
At this he glanced at her sharply, and then looked away over the tops of the trees to the political mausoleum of the City Hall. "We take that as a sort of joke now," he remarked irrelevantly, "but the time was—and not so long ago either—when we boasted of it more than of the Lee monument. Cost a lot too, they say! Queer, ain't it, the way we spend a million dollars or more on a thing one year, and the next want to kick it out on the junk heap? I reckon it's the same way about behaviour too. It ain't so much what you do as the time you do it in that seems to make the difference." As she showed no inclination to follow this train of moralizing, he asked suddenly, "Do you remember your mother?"
"Only once. I remember seeing her once." He had not imagined that her voice could become so gentle.
"Did they ever tell you what became of her?"
"Yes, I know that. She lost her mind. They told me that she died in the asylum."
He was still watching her closely, as if he were observing the effect on her nerves of each word he uttered. "Did they tell you the cause of it?"
She shook her head. "That was all they ever told me."
"You mean your father never mentioned it to you? Are you sure he never spoke of Mrs. Green?"
"I shouldn't have forgotten. But, if she is my mother's sister, why has she never written to me?"
"Ah, that's just it! She was afraid your father wouldn't like it. There was a difference of some kind. I don't know what it was about—but they didn't get on—and—and—"