She took her daughter's face between her hands, her eyes probing and yearning down into the brilliantly blue ones.
"It is because I want to keep life clean and beautiful for you. Nothing that is natural is ugly, Zoe. It's only when we make something dark and shameful of nature's methods that we are apt to misunderstand and to err."
"Did you err, Lilly?"
"How?"
"With him?"
"Who?"
"Penny."
"Zoe! Zoe! why will you refer to him that way? Yes, I erred out of ignorance, the kind I want to save you from. In my case your father had to pay for the ignorance of a girl who married him without knowing what marriage meant. Ignorance!"
"How funny to hear that—word."
"What word?"