Before the bland passivity of this remark it seemed that irony itself must soften.
'I am engaged, mother.'
'What in, dear?'
'I am going to bring home a wife.'
She was deaf and very sleepy.
'What kind of a knife, dear?' she asked.
'I am going to marry Hazel Woodus.'
'You can't do that, dear,' She spoke with unruffled calm, as if Edward were three years old.
'I can, and shall mother.'
'Ah, well, it won't be for a long, long time,' she said, thinking aloud as she often did, and adding with the callousness that sometimes comes with age—arising not from hardness, but from the atrophy of the emotions—'and, of course, she may die before then.'