"You see--" Catherine glanced up doubtfully. "I can't write to Charles. It sounds too much like crowing." She fingered her soup spoon. She wanted to talk about Charles, too. Bill would understand. Those brief, impersonal notes of his: he was well, he was working on his book, he was busy with semester finals, the children were well, yours, Charles.
"You never saw Charles's mother, did you?" asked Bill.
"No." Catherine waited. Bill was never random in his associations.
"Lots of times. She was devoted to him, wasn't she? You knew her?"
"We lived next door for years, you know. She died just as Charles went to college. His father had died years earlier. Just enough income for comfort, and just Charles. I think"--he grinned a little--"that you'll have to train Charles as long as she did, before he can fully appreciate your career."
"Yes. But--I think I can tell you this, without violation--Charles told me once, talking of you before I had met you, that to him you were the perfect woman, like his mother. Which meant--tender, loving, and devoted."
Catherine's spoon clicked against the soup plate. Her eyelids were suddenly heavy, weighted with memories. Charles had said that to her, years ago. A cold finger touched her heart, binding it, and she knew, through all the brimming delight of the past days, how she had hidden away the troubling thought of Charles.
"I don't mean that she spoiled him grossly," Bill was saying. "She was too New England, too much what we used to call a gentlewoman for that. Charles was simply the center of her life; his welfare, his desires, his future--those things set the radius of her circle. She had nothing else, you see. Except the idea"--the corners of Bill's mouth rose in his slow smile--"that since Charles was a man, he was a superior being. Did women really think that, Catherine? Or was that a concession they knew they could easily afford to make?"
"But Charles doesn't think men are superior." Catherine's smile was uncertain, begging for assurance. "Why, those early experiments of his, the brochures he published, were directed against that very superstition."
"Yes. Intellectually he has come a long way since those early days. But that matters so much less than we like to think."