"Are you twenty-nine or thirty?"
"Thirty."
"You don't look it. You've always been such a little thing…. You remember the silly question you used to ask me? 'Mamma—would you love me better if I was two?'"
She remembered. Long ago. When she came teasing for kisses. The silly question.
"You remember that?"
"Yes. I remember."
Deep down inside her there was something you would never know.
XXIX
I.
Mamma was planting another row of asters in the garden in the place of those that had died last September.