Isadora had glowed at that.

She had thought: here is a man who sees. She understood now that he had meant it only as long as he believed it cost him nothing — that it was easy to disdain wealth when you assumed you already had it, easy to praise a humble wife when you thought her humility was the whole truth of her.

The moment the marriage stopped feeling like enough, the very quality he had claimed to love became the thing he held against her. You should be grateful. It was the exact inversion of the sentiment he had married her on, and neither he nor his mother ever noticed the contradiction, because to them it had never been a principle at all.

It had only ever been a way to feel superior, and it could be pointed in whatever direction the feeling required.

She had held them all up, and they had used the height to look down on her.

There was, she thought, no cleaner summary of the entire family than that.