Whatever small hesitation might have remained in me, whatever last maternal flinch, that sign with its gold letters took cleanly away.

Because a sign like that is not made in a moment of passion.

You do not commission a large, elegantly printed sign in gold letters in a fit of temper.

You order it weeks in advance.

You choose the wording, and the typeface, and you approve a proof, and you pay for it, and you have it mounted on an easel by the front door for a hundred guests to admire.

It is, in other words, the product of a settled intention, a considered decision made over time and in cold blood — the decision that this house, my house, the house I had bled thirty years of work to buy, now belonged so wholly to the Vance family that their name should stand first upon it, in gold, permanently, for all the world to see.