"How is she? Really?"
"Who?"
"Cora. My daughter. Your daughter-in-law."
"Look at her. What do you think how she is? This coming out ball for Rose is her doing. She seems rather satisfied with it. And she still looks at Robert as if she thought he turned the sun on and off every day."
"She certainly loves him. But that is not what I mean. How is she, concerning Sybil and Matthew?"
"Why are you asking me? Ask her."
"She'll say 'Mother, I am fine. I've got to go.'"
"And you think she says more than that to me?"
"I don't know if she says more than that to you but you see her almost every day."
"She is fine. She still misses both Sybil and Matthew but so do we all. But she has made it through that dark time relatively unscathed."
"I can't imagine what it must be like to lose a child."
"It was horrible for both of them."
"Both of them?"
"Do you think that Robert didn't suffer? It broke his heart just as much as Cora's."
"Really."
"Of course. What do you take him for? A heartless monster?"
"No. But he is, you know, English."
"Which doesn't mean that he can't love. He loved both Sybil and Matthew just as much as Cora did. Though understandably Sybil's death hit both of them harder. It almost broke them apart."
"It did?"
"Don't you know anything about your daughter?"
"Well, you seem to know quite a lot about her."
"As you said, I see her almost every day and she wears her heart on her sleeve."
"How did it almost break them apart?"
"They didn't know how to deal with their grief, Cora more so than Robert. She blamed him for things he wasn't to blame for. But there is no use in talking about it."
"Violet, I want to know."
"Then ask Cora."
"She won't tell me. She didn't mention it in her letters once. I noticed that she hardly mentioned Robert in the first two or three letters after Sybil's death, but she never said that there was something wrong between them."
"Then she doesn't want you to know."
"So you must tell me."
"Do you honestly think that I would break hers and Robert's confidences, especially for something that was so painful for them and that you look at as a piece of gossip?"
"Violet, I know you think that I don't love my daughter, but that is not true."
"You paid for a title with her and her inheritance."
"Let's not talk about that."
"Oh, that you don't want to talk about. But you want to talk about something Cora obviously doesn't want you to know."
"I worry about her. You are not the only person in this world who cares about her. I know you think that you love her more than I do, no, don't deny it, you do love her, and maybe you really do love her more than I do, because she certainly is closer to you than she is to me, but that is my own fault. But I do love her and I do worry."
"There is no reason to worry. She is doing well, honestly. And so is Mary now, thankfully."
"It must have been horrible for Mary."
"It was. But I am not going to break Mary's confidences either. She is better now, almost back to normal, that is all you need to know."
"Thank you for being there for them when I can't. Cora and the girls I mean."