“I’ve been thinking a good deal since I came here. Why don’t you send my mother away for a time?”
“She wouldn’t go.”
“Why not go with her?”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter.”
“Are we very stick-in-the-mud?”
“It isn’t that. But why not go away—or leave Fern Square? Minna tells me that neither you nor my mother have been the same since James died. . . . It must have been a shock to you.”
“It was.”
“You don’t mind my mentioning it?”