“Are you going to let your back hair down and tell me secrets of sex?” I asked.
“Yes, if you have to be told,” she said with a half smile. “You’re old enough now to know the facts of life, Donald.”
“All right, tell me.”
“The people with individualities,” she said, “are just the same all the time. They won’t resort to all the little sneaky tricks of character-changing that the hypocrites will. Women of that type simply show themselves. They show themselves as they are. A man can either like them well enough to marry them or not.
“Then there’s the other type. They don’t have any personalities of their own except disagreeable personalities, and they know enough to keep those defects of character covered up. Well, Dad’s present wife found out that he was lonely, that he wanted a home, that his daughter was out traveling around the world and would probably get married. She invited him out to her home for dinners.
“Bob was swell, gave the picture of man-to-man good-fellowship, and she was nothing like the way you see her now. Dad never heard about her blood pressure until after he married her. She was just a sweet, home-loving thing who didn’t care about going out, who wanted to make a home for someone, who would stroke Dad’s forehead when he was tired and play chess with him — oh, she just adored chess—” Alta’s eyes glittered. “She hasn’t played a single game of chess with him since they were married.” She raised her voice so that it mimicked her stepmother. “ ‘Oh, I’d lo-o-ove to, Henry. I miss those games so-o-o-o much, but my poor head! It’s my blood pressure, you know. The doctor says I must have things very quiet and easy.’ ”
Suddenly she stopped and said, “There you go. You got me started. I suppose you’ve been waiting for this opportunity, figuring that some time you’d get me when I was mad enough to tell you the whole damn thing.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I don’t care a great deal about it. I wanted to know about what financial arrangements you’d had with your brother.”
“That’s gratitude for you,” she said with a little laugh. “I bare my soul, and you say you didn’t want to hear it.”
I grinned at her. “Had anything to eat?”