"But dear Mrs. De Castro! Why should you be annoyed?"
Dolly answered with decision: "Robert has no business ever to speak of the affair." Alice could not dispute her and Dolly went on: "I know just how he would talk about it. Not that I know what he said to you. But it would be like him to take very much more of the blame on himself than belongs to him. Men, my dear, look at these things differently from women, and usually make less of them than women do. In this case it is exactly the reverse. Robert has always had an exaggerated idea of his responsibility in the tragedy--that is why it annoys me ever to have him speak about it. I know my brother better, I think, than anybody alive knows him, and I am perfectly familiar with all the circumstances. I know what I am talking about."
Very much in earnest Dolly settled back. "To begin with, Tennie was an abnormal boy. He was as delicate in his mental texture as cobweb lace. His sensitiveness was something incredible and twenty things might have happened to upset his mental balance. No one, my dear, likes to talk state secrets."
"Pray do not, then. It really is not necessary," pleaded Alice.
"Oh, it is," said Dolly decidedly, "I want you to understand. Suicide has been a spectre to the Kimberlys for ages. Two generations ago Schuyler Kimberly committed suicide at sixty-six--think of it! Oh! I could tell you stories. There has been no suicide in this generation. But the shadow," Dolly’s tones were calm but inflected with a burden of what cannot be helped may as well be admitted, "seems only to have passed it to fall upon the next in poor Tennie. Two years afterward they found his mother dead one morning in bed. I don’t know what the trouble was--it was in Florence. Nobody knows--there was just a little white froth on her lips. The doctors said heart disease. She was a strange woman, Bertha, strong-willed and self-indulgent--like all the rest of us."
"Don’t say that of yourself. You are not self-indulgent, you are generous."
"I am both, dear. But I know the Kimberlys, men and women, first and last, and that is why I do not want you to get wrong impressions of them. My brother Robert isn’t a saint, neither is Charles. But compare them with the average men of their own family; compare them with the average men in their own situation in life; compare them with the Nelsons and the Doanes; compare them with that old man that Robert is so patient with! Compare them, my dear, to the men everywhere in the world they move in--I don’t think the Kimberly men of this generation need apologize particularly.