It was impossible to interest her in anything worth while. But as to the things in which she was interested, none could have thought more clearly or keenly, or could have acted with more vigor and effect. I have often made serious blunders--inexcusable blunders--in managing my own affairs. To go no further, my management of my family would have convicted me of imbecility before any court not made up of good-natured, indifferent, woman-worshiping, woman-despising American husbands. Yes, I have made the stupidest blunders in all creation. But I cannot recall a single notable blunder made by Edna in the matters which alone she deemed worthy of her attention. She decided what she wanted. She moved upon it by the best route, whether devious or direct or a combination of the two. And she always got it. You may say her success was due to the fact that her objects were trivial. But if you will think a moment, you will appreciate that a thing’s triviality does not necessarily make it easy to attain. As much energy and skill may be shown in winning a sham battle as in winning a real. Still, I suppose minds are cast in molds of various sizes, and one cast in a small mold can deal only with the small. And I guess that, from whatever cause, the minds of women are of diverse kinds of smaller molds. Perhaps this is the result of bad education. Perhaps better education will correct it. I do not know. I can speak only of what is--of Edna as she is and always has been. Having made up her mind to fell the genealogical tree, that an artificial one might be stood up in its place, she lost no time in getting into action. It was on the Sunday following our talk--the earliest possible day--that she took me for the first visit we had made our parents in nearly three years. We had sent them presents. We had written them letters. We had received painfully composed and ungrammatical replies--these received both for Edna and myself at my office, because she feared the servants would pry into periodically arriving exhibits of illiteracy. We had written them of coming and bringing Margot with us. We had received suggestions of their coming to see us, which Edna had evaded by such excuses as that we were moving or that she or Margot was not well or that the cook had abruptly deserted. The world outside Passaic was a vague place to our old fathers and mothers. Their own immediate affairs kept them busy. So with no sense of deliberate alienation on their side and small and mildly intermittent sense of it on our side, the months and the years passed without our seeing one another. Edna announced to me the intended visit only an hour before we started. It was a habit of hers--a clever habit, too--never to take anyone into her confidence about her plans until the right moment--that is, the moment when execution was so near at hand that discussion would seem futile. At a quarter before nine on that Sunday morning she said: