CHAPTER 22I sat there alone in front of the fire, wondering what the little old lady would think if she knew the real extent of the folly that surrounded her. Mrs. Reid had paid for her husband’s, would go on paying for her own. It seemed curiously ironic, I thought, that her final attempt to wash up the payments had brought the whole bitter load down on us in one great avalanche. It was almost as if she had escaped too long; in trying to destroy the illusion she herself had built for self-protection, she had unleashed the furies.
It was another instance, I supposed, of what Miss Caroline, with the euphemism of the Old South, called folly. In trying to wipe out the past Mrs. Reid had recreated it…a victim of her own fate, or perhaps—and I’ve thought of it many times, still not entirely su
