I don’t think, looking back on it, that that in itself was the reason for the slow sick feeling of apprehension that curdled the spoon bread and deviled crab in the pit of my stomach. It was much more the sudden sharp-eyed calculation in Irene Winthrop’s blue unclouded eyes, the almost imperceptible tightening around her red mouth as she glanced from her son’s face to Cheryl’s taut gold-tipped figure going through the carved rubbed-pine door before she turned her back and held Mr. Purcel’sl cup to the silver coffee urn.
I should have liked to see her face just then. I have the feeling that that moment crystallized her antagonism to her elder son’s young widow . . . and I’m not sure, as a matter of fact, that it wasn’t the most justifiable moment of that otherwise totally unjustifiable wee
