I also respected her willingness and effort to get on with Lee, and to try to make the best of what apparently was not a particularly good marriage, but yet she had made that commitment and she expected to do her best for it.
Mr. Jenner. What is your present reaction, and even as you went along, of her feeling or regard for or with respect to you?
Mrs. Paine. I felt she liked me. I felt she tended to put me in a position of Aunt Ruth, as she called me, I have already said, to Junie, almost as aunt to her rather than a mother as she was equal, in other words, she was a young mother and I was a young mother equal in age and stage in life.
Mr. Jenner. By the way, you were of her age, were you?
Mrs. Paine. No; I am older than she. I am 31.
Mr. Jenner. You are 31 and she is what?
Mrs. Paine. Twenty-two. But our children were fairly close in age, and our immediate problems were fairly similar therefore.
Mr. Jenner. Now; would you give me your reaction to Robert?
Mrs. Paine. I have very little reaction to Robert, of course, having met him only at the police station and said very little to him there, and equally little when he came with Mr. Thorne and Mr. Martin to pick up Marina's things at my house a few weeks after the assassination. That is the sum total of my contact, so that what impressions I have have been formed from what people said and not directly formed.
Mr. Jenner. In other words, you had so little contact with him that you really have formed no particular opinion with respect to him?