That was so like Mary. She had to try everything twice, even burning herself on the stove, to be sure the first experience wasn’t a freak failure. In his calmer moments David could view it as a sort of persistent intelligence, but just now his patience with Mary was running thin.

David tried not to think about his younger daughter, her half-defiant, half-pious refusal to have anything to do with Diana as a new fact in her life. He should, he supposed, accept that. He acknowledged that Diana and Constance were potential obsessions for him, against whom he must not guard himself so much as them. They didn’t, after all, view their life together as a banishment. They were not waiting to be forgiven and restored. David was the petitioner on behalf of himself and those members of his family who might be pleasing and even helpful to them. He couldn’t take Mary out and buy her a brand new set of moral perceptions to make her presentable. And Ted, unlike Jack, had more personal ground to defend from Mary’s encroaching will than he could handle without taking on the instruction of her as a potential niece to Diana. Perhaps David had all he could expect now from his younger daughter, a right to his privacy, her resigned acceptance of the fact that he had a sister and saw her.

Diana had agreed to receive Laura and Jack more to please David than to satisfy any curiosity of her own. And Mary’s unwillingness would be a matter of indifference to Diana, not the affront it was to David. While he knew that he had no right to expect what he did of either of his daughters, Laura’s natural generosity of spirit made Mary’s intractability the more galling to him.

But why on earth would his perfectly intelligent child turn to magazines like Châtelaine for guidance, depend on gimmicks and clichés to avoid coming to some real understanding of herself? If David were an activist, he would begin by waging a campaign against women’s hairdressers, for he knew that was where his own wife had weekly reconfirmed the moral structure of her universe in which the basic requirement of a good wife and a good mother was to be right. Mary had lost that mother with whom she had never really been able to make peace as Laura had. So willing to cross her mother in life, Mary was now mourning her with fierce, irrational loyalties to everything from garden shrubs to old grudges about which she knew and wanted to know nothing. In David’s observation, time healed only very imperfectly a break not understood and set at the time.