Note 30 — Chapter Eighteen
Reading edition
... even though, as old Jessup used to say, “I says it who shouldn’t”, if ever a mother was blessed with children who adored her, that mother was ours. Not only Davey. My sisters were her obedient little girls to the end. I can still see Phil, on the very evening that a business venture with which he was concerned took on, overnight, as it were, proportions that caused us all to gasp, sitting in the drawing-room of his new Springfield home; telephone jangling, messengers arriving, reporters and friends in and out, trying to make Mother, whose memory, as time went on, became paler and paler, comprehend the dramatics of the thing that was happening all around her.
Dear soul, her dim eyes wanted so to understand what it was caused his hand to tremble as he told her the same thing in every imaginable form, trying to penetrate the thick, cruel fog, beating about in his brain for ways and means to help her.
As for David—I cannot write it clear-eyed—long after he had passed out of our family jurisdiction, so to speak, and had become the property of the people, he was at her beck and call. I have seen him sit beside her for hours on end, patiently trying to answer her feeble and insistent questions. Tides in the affairs of state and nation beat up around the very room in which they sat with a terrific imminence, but they never budged him from her side while she wanted him there.
Poor Mama—yet who am I to pity her!