“Mollie is right. We all get on each other’s nerves. It can’t be helped, I suppose. It’s part of the system.”
“I can’t help being your mother-in-law, Clare.”
“No, it can’t he helped,” said Clare.
Mrs. Heywood came close to her and touched her hand.
“You think I do not understand. You think you are the only one who has any grievance.”
“Oh, no!” said Clare. “I am not so egotistical.”
Mrs. Heywood smoothed down her dress with trembling hands.
“You think I haven’t been watching you all these years. I have watched you so that I know your thoughts behind those brooding eyes, Clare. I know all that you have been thinking and suffering, so that sometimes you hate me, so that my very presence here in the room with you makes you wish to cry out, to shriek, because I am your mother-in-law, and the mother of your husband. The husband always loves his mother best, and the wife always knows it. That is the eternal tragedy of the mother-in-law. Because she is hated by the wife of her son, and is an intruder in her home. I know that because I too suffered from a mother-in-law. Do you think I would stay here an hour unless I was forced to stay, for a shelter above my old head, for some home in which I wait to die? But while I wait I watch... and I know that you have reached a dangerous stage in a woman’s life, when she may do any rash thing. Clare, I pray every night that you may pass that stage in life without doing anything—rash. This time always comes in marriage, it comes——”
“In the Eighth Year?” asked Clare eagerly. “Somewhere about then.”
“Ah! I thought so.”