But some animal instinct in him registered that his wife was becoming harder to move, harder to manage, more solid — and a man who has built his whole life on the softness and dependence of the people around him feels it in his teeth when they begin, quietly, to set.

I watched that process in my mother over that month with a kind of wonder, because it was so undramatic and so complete.

She did not become a different person.

She did not grow loud, or hard, or bitter; she was the same gentle woman who had made coffee before dawn for thirty-four years.

What changed was not her nature but her position — the ground she stood on.

A woman who has her own income stands differently in a room than a woman who does not, even if she never raises her voice, even if the income is small.