Mother did, and, Nathaniel suspected, that fascination, as much as pity for Tad’s death, had drawn her back into Gertrude’s circle. She became one of Gertrude’s closest friends, which was funny, he thought, because the two weren’t at all alike. Physically, Mother looked almost childlike beside Gertrude. Mother spoke softly and moved slowly and graciously; Gertrude barked in unadorned, telegraphic phrases, and she liked to tear along, whether it was across a room or down a street, pitched slightly forward at the waist, her great bosom thrust out in front, her whole body like a White Star liner under a full head of steam. And where she was full of unconventional ideas, Mother, for all her beauty and charm, was as ordinary as a Sunday drive, voicing ordinary opinions and making ordinary conversation. The two or three times Nathaniel had been trapped in the house when she had her Back Bay friends over for tea, he thought their talk passed beyond the merely dull into the paralyzingly boring. In such company, she seemed to lose her touch for the embellished phrase, the quirky metaphor. How do you find the weather today, Mrs. Farnsworth? Don’t you think it unseasonably hot?… Oh, yes, Elizabeth, it is unpropitious for May.… And yet, isn’t every season subject to variation.… She kept on her desk in the sitting room the most recent edition of a manual her aunt Judith had presented to her when she was sixteen—Manners, Culture, and Dress of the Best American Society—a kind of pilot book for navigating tricky social waters. A lot of that stuff came naturally to her, but she still consulted the book whenever she was stumped about the proper way to do something or say something. And yet, she did not want to be conventional. Nathaniel sensed that somehow. Maybe it was the way she blew out her cheeks and muttered to herself, “Thank God!” when tea time was over and the Back Bay ladies had gone home. Maybe it was the way her personality changed when she was around Gertrude Williams, laughing louder than she usually did, moving about not with her usual stately languor but with a certain briskness, asking Gertrude, eager as a schoolgirl, what she should be reading (and Gertrude replying, “Can tell what you shouldn’t be reading—that stuff and nonsense in Ladies Home Journal. Try some Ibsen, Liza, or George Bernard Shaw—there’s a first rate mind”).