"There's a part of me that doesn't care and there's a part that cares frightfully."
The part that cared was not free. Not free. Prisoned in her mother's bedroom with the yellow furniture that remembered. Her mother's face that remembered. Always the same vexed, disapproving, remembering face. And her own heart, sinking at each beat, dragging remembrance. A dead child, remembering and returning.
"I can't think where you got it from," her mother was saying. "Unless it's those books you're always reading. Or was it that man?"
"What man?"
"Maurice Jourdain."
"No. It wasn't. What made you think of him?"
"Never you mind."
Actually her mother was smiling and trying not to smile, as if she were thinking of something funny and improper.
"There's one thing I must beg of you," she said, "that whatever you choose to think, you'll hold your tongue about it."
"All my life? Like Aunt Lavvy?"