Mortimer needs things explained.

Age is catching up with him. Said once, it is a joke.

Said a hundred times, over a year, in front of a rotating audience of friends and neighbors and dinner guests, it becomes a settled fact in the minds of everyone who knows us — a shared understanding that poor Mortimer is slipping, that his devoted young wife carries a heavy burden, that no one should be surprised when the decline becomes total.

She was not venting contempt.

She was manufacturing consensus.

By the time she needed a room full of people to believe I was incompetent, she would not have to convince them of anything; she would only have to remind them of what they already, through a year of her careful jokes, believed they had seen with their own eyes.