"He'd have been sent away anyhow," said Frances. "It isn't good for him to hang about listening to grown-up conversation."
It was her part to keep the peace between her mother and her sisters.
"It seems to me," said Auntie Louie, "that you began it yourself."
When a situation became uncomfortable, Auntie Louie always put her word in and made it worse. She never would let Frances keep the peace.
Frances knew what Louie meant--that she was always flinging her babies in Emmy's face at those moments when the sight of other people's babies was too much for Emmy. She could never be prepared for Emmy's moments.
"It's all very well," Auntie Louie went on; "but I should like to hear of somebody admiring Dorothy. I don't see where Dorothy comes in."
Dorothy was supposed, by the two Nannas, to be Auntie Louie's favourite. If you taxed her with it she was indignant and declared that she was sure she wasn't.
And again Frances knew what Louie meant--that she loved her three sons, Michael and Nicholas and John, with passion, and her one daughter, Dorothea, with critical affection. That was the sort of thing that Louie was always saying and thinking about people, and nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what Louie said or thought. Frances told herself that if there was one emotion that she was more free from than another it was sex jealousy.
The proof of it, which she offered now, was that she had given up Dorothy to Anthony. It was natural that he should care most for the little girl.
Louie said that was easy--when she knew perfectly well that Anthony didn't. Like Frances he cared most for his three sons. She was leaving Dorothy to Anthony so that Anthony might leave Michael and Nicholas to her.