He could not have been more embarrassed had he found her praying. “Accidenti!” he said. “How dull for you. But do you—?”

“Understand anything? Well, no, not much, naturally.”

“Then why ever do you bother?”

Isabel took the book back and started to get out of the car. She looked oppressed and, he thought at first, offended. He opened his own door and went round to hers, astonishment still in his face.

And it was with astonishment, more than anything else, that he saw her eyes enlarge with tears before she turned from him toward the house—an unbearable astonishment that called upon all his capacities for comprehension. He followed her in silence. They entered the house together and began to climb the stairs. He was profoundly aware of her, moving slowly and sadly at his side, but it did not occur to him to speak. He felt that he must be alone to think about it, that there must be some rational, disappointing explanation. He could scarcely breathe, from the stairs and from astonishment. He had never been so astonished in his life.

IN ONE’S OWN HOUSE

“I hope we didn’t wake you, Miranda,” Constance said.

Miranda had come downstairs in her dressing gown, forgetting that her mother-in-law always appeared at breakfast fully dressed. And there she was, Constance, in a linen dress and a green sweater, pouring out coffee. This early rising and dressing on Constance’s part was rather uncharacteristic. She herself readily explained it to her guests as the necessity of setting a good example. “In one’s own house,” she would then add—it was an expression she was particularly fond of.

In other respects, Constance affected a charming disorder, which turned to downright vagueness in the face of other people’s difficulties. Of independent mind and means (“a widow with a little money” was another of her favored phrases), she repudiated, shrewdly or selfishly, untidy elements in the lives of others. Within her own controlled variety of moods, coy or unfeeling, she maintained a handsome serenity—like a country that, suffering no extremes of climate, remains always green. Her affection was largely reserved for her younger son, James, now seated beside her at the breakfast table, holding his coffee cup in both his hands and resting his elbows on the edge of the table. With her other son, Miranda’s husband Russell, she had never felt at ease. She saw him seldom—when he and Miranda visited her here in the country, or on her own rare trips to New York. She thought him sarcastic, intense, unknowable; his attitude toward her seemed to be one of continual reproach, and she could not help wondering what, in his mind, he accused her of. She was distressed, but not surprised, that he had managed to have a nervous breakdown.