It was a man saying the only thing he could think of to make a Tuesday afternoon end.

The problem is that I took it as a strategy, and I ran it for nine years.

Because Gertrude did not say it once.

She said it, in one form or another, perhaps twenty times over nine years, always obliquely, always in company, always in a way that could not be objected to without my becoming the person who had made a scene.

At a Christmas: “Of course, we’d have had a nine-year-old running around here, but there we are.”