That is the whole of my father’s objection and it took him four words and it is, I have come to think, the most honest version of the position anybody offered me.

Not that Esme had not been hurt.

He never once said that.

Not that Perla was innocent, which he also never said.

That there are two categories of thing in the world — family problems and state problems — and that once a thing crosses from the first to the second you never get it back, and that I had held the door.

He is right about that, incidentally.