And now it happens every day—in the best families, too. I do worry about Robin and his undisciplined, self-indulgent ways. Those bright, hungry eyes! Probably every granny in the world has said the same about a grandson or granddaughter, and I am not going to indulge myself in the poor old game of deploring the world of the young.

No, I want to think about my darling Cornelius. The sweetness of marriages that last and grow, as ours has. When we first married I was selfish and demanding without even being aware of it. Heavens, how narcissistic young women are! I am ashamed even to think of it now, but I really did look down on Cornelius as such a “square.” I was always trying to change him then. Now I wouldn’t change him for the world. I love him as he is; his old-fashioned ways seem doubly precious because they are becoming so rare. The intensity of his friendships with his men friends—his loyalty to the Tavern, to Harvard, and the totally unexpected largeness of his political views after the depression, when he became such an ardent supporter of Roosevelt! His feeling about France that really goes too deep for words—this is one thing the children cannot understand.

The other day it came to me as a shock that I had never really looked at Cornelius—we have become so much a part of each other, like the two trunks of a tree that branch out from the same root. But since his stroke I have wanted so much to paint his portrait. It is a magnificent head—his eyes set so deep under that open, wide brow, the big, generous mouth—generous and firm, and, above all, the way his head is set on his shoulders. He has grown a little jowly, but it suits him. Heaviness suits him. It becomes his kind of wisdom, never quick or flashy, but grown out of a rocklike belief in the old virtues of honesty, loyalty, scrupulous attention to any responsibility within his ken.—There I go again! As if there were a kind of wisdom within my ken but not within his, arrogant old woman that I am. Or is it only that the wisdom of women has a different source from that of men? I wonder.