I’ve had a version of that scene from each one of them, and on the whole the accounts tally, although of course each viewed it--as they viewed everything--exclusively from the personal angle. My mother saw only a young, beautiful, misunderstood woman, goaded to frenzy in the grip of an uncongenial marriage, taking a desperate step in search of freedom. And then, even stronger and more touching in her relinquishment, finding the courage, for love of her child, to return to the house of bondage. And my grandmother, with equal inevitability, saw only a sorrow-worn woman, no longer young (but infinitely interesting), courageously undertaking a solitary journey, on a mission that should restore sanctity to a shattered home. And even as her urgent plea had shaken Robert’s defences, so her eloquence, her boundless influence and unfaltering understanding, must prevail with the slighter, more trivial personality of her daughter. The achievement of persuading Mary to return to her husband and child was, my grandmother told me, the ultimate justification of her existence, in her own eyes. As a matter of fact, I doubt if she, any more than the rest of us, felt her existence to be in any need of justification whatsoever--but she was addicted to phrases, and this one at least served as an indication to the magnitude of her effort. For Mary did not capitulate without a struggle. And it is in the details of that struggle that my reconstruction work comes in, for although each of the protagonists has quoted to me whole sentences, and even speeches, of brilliant oratory from herself and inadequate rejoinder from the other, I do not believe either of them. Accuracy, with that type, can never co-exist with emotion--and emotion, real or imaginary, is never absent. But this, I imagine, is more or less what took place in the sitting-room of the tiny _albergo_ at Assisi: “I’ve come to fetch you home, my child. You shall never hear one word of reproach--Robert only wants to begin again--a new life.” “Never, mother. It’s impossible. I’ve borne too much. I can’t ever go back to it. I must live my own life.” (Probably Mary had been reading _The Doll’s House_. People were discovering Ibsen in those days.) “Mary, it’s not five years since you and Robert were married, in the little country church at home, by our dear old vicar, who held you at the font when I took you, a tiny baby, to be christened.” It may have been at this stage that Mary began to cry. Anyway, I’m certain that my grandmother did. Any allusions, however irrelevant, to little country churches at home, and Mary as a tiny baby, were always apt to bring the tears to her eyes--and I’m sure that neither of them had thought for an instant of steadying their nerves by sitting down to a solid meal. So that tears must have been easier, even, than usual. “Robert doesn’t understand me--he never will.”