Joe isn’t quite on London time and Edwin never sleeps. Mary goes to bed with a kiss for each, and he and Joe settle in to make a night of it. It’s raining now, a steady patter and, in spite of the lovely day, they are feeling London’s chill damp. Edwin builds a fire and they pull two chairs up to it. The red light flickers over Joe’s thin face; his cheeks, once so cherubic, have sunk. He stretches his legs, sits low and curved in his chair. All is quiet except for the fire, the occasional sizzle of a drop falling through the chimney onto the coals, and the clock ticking on the mantel. Edwin produces some brandy and the two share family stories. It begins lighthearted, but turns quickly otherwise. Soon Joe is running, piece by piece, through a carefully curated argument in favor of himself as the most aggrieved, the most abused of the Booth siblings.

“When I was at Mother’s, I met Asia’s friend Lizzie Markson,” he tells Edwin. “And do you know what she said to me? She said she never knew there was a brother younger than John. Not the first time this has happened, mind you. Half your friends don’t even know I exist. They know of all the rest of you.”

Edwin has no ready excuse, but it doesn’t matter because Joe is moving on. “Whenever you all were together,” he says, “I was off at school. Even when John and I were at school together, he came home nights and I was boarded away.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you were the better off?” Edwin asks. “I always envied you your schooling—nothing to do but study and be with your friends.”

“I didn’t have friends,” Joe says. “I didn’t have friends and I didn’t have family. I was the loneliest boy in the world.”

Edwin will not give up his own status as most put-upon Booth without a fight. He’s astonished to hear Joe talk about his golden path to riches, the sunny idyll that has always been Edwin’s life. He tries to set Joe straight, telling him about the loneliness of the years on the road with Father, the way Father’s death still haunts him, how, brandy in hand, his current life is one long struggle with drink.

Joe reminds him that, at seventeen, he’d had so many teeth pulled, he’d had to wear a horseshoe-shaped wooden brace in his mouth for more than a year to preserve the shape of his jaw.

To this, Edwin has no answer. Asia, hearing some version of this evening later, tells June that they quarreled, because it suits Asia now to imagine people are quarreling with Edwin. In fact, it was all quite cordial. They just didn’t in the end agree about the rank of their suffering.