Then the line went dead, and I sat looking at the telephone on the chest of drawers.

I want to lay out what was in those four sentences, because at the time I registered it as ordinary friction and it was not ordinary friction, and I have spent a long time since learning to read it.

The first sentence took the ground away from Kevin’s answer without arguing with it.

The second put my mother’s name in a sentence with a tone around it, so that if anybody ever objected she could say she had only been pleasant.

The third was an instruction dressed as a request.