f my coming. She told of her
life with Father, and of the mistakes she made. She told much, of
course, that was in Mary Marie's diary; but she told, too, oh, so much
more, until like a panorama the whole thing lay before me.

Then she spoke of me, and of my childhood, and her voice began to
quiver. She told of the Mary and the Marie, and of the dual nature
within me. (As if I didn't know about that!) But she told me much that
I did not know, and she made things much clearer to me, until I saw--

You can see things so much more clearly when you stand off at a
distance like this, you know, than you can when you are close to them!

She broke down and cried when she spoke of the divorce, and of the
influence it had upon me, and of the false idea of marriage it gave
me. She said it was the worst kind of thing for me--the sort of life I
had to live. She said I grew pert and precocious and worldly-wise, and
full of servants' talk and ideas. She even spoke of that night at the
little cafe table when I gloried in the sparkle and spangles and told
her that now we were seeing life--real life. And of how shocked she
was, and of how she saw then what this thing was doing to me. But it
was too late.

She told more, much more, about the later years, and the
reconciliation; then, some way, she brought things around to Jerry and
me. Her face flushed up then, and she didn't meet my eyes. She looked
down at her sewing. She was very busy turning a hem _just so_.

She said there had been a time, once, when she had worried a little
about Jerry and me, for fear we would--separate. She said that she
believed that, for her, that would have been the very blackest moment
of her life; for it would be her fault, all her fault.

I tried to break in here, and say, "No, no," and that it wasn't her
fault; but she shook her head and wouldn't listen, and she lifted
her hand, and I had to keep still and let her go on talking. She was
looking straight into my eyes then, and there was such a deep, deep
hurt in them that I just had to listen.

She said again that it would be her fault; that if I had done that she
would have known that it was all because of the example she herself
had set me of childish willfulness and selfish seeking of personal
happiness at the expense of everything and everybody else. And she
said that that would have been the last straw to break her heart.

But she declared that she was sure now that she need not worry. Such a
th