them. I want them to have all the advantages I never had.”

If Ed was present at such times he would look up from his paper to say, “The kids’ll never thank you for it, Marsh.”

“I don’t want them to.”

There was something strangely familiar about the whole thing as it sounded in Hannah’s ears.

The matter of the brace, alone. There was a tiny gap between Joan’s two front teeth and, strangely enough, between Peter’s as well. It seemed to Hannah that every well-to-do child in Hyde Park had developed this gap between the two incisors and that all the soft pink child mouths in the district parted to display a hideous and disfiguring arrangement of complicated wire and