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noticeable in the McBride household, as Nancy’s paternal uncle had been quite a good friend of the late Cardinal Gibbons; and the McBrides, as they themselves put it, realized their position. It was a religious household, including the servants, and at the time of Nancy’s various debuts the big house in the East Seventies still had its quota of holy pictures, and there was hardly a bureau which did not contain one drawer full of broken rosary beads, crucifixes with the corpus missing, Father Lasance’s
My Prayer Book, The Ordinary of the Mass
, and other prayer books for special occasions. One of Nancy’s losing battles against the domination of her elders (and they were all defeats) was fought for the removal of a small, white china holywater font which hung at the door of her bedroom. She finally capitulated because a Westover friend who was visiting her was curious and delighted by the sacred article.
    Nancy was the youngest of four children. The first-born, Thornton, was ten years older than Nancy. He was out of a high-priced Catholic prep school, Yale, and Fordham Law School. He was with his father in the law firm and cared about nothing except the law and golf.
    Next in age was Nancy’s only sister, Mollie. She was eight years older than Nancy, and when Nancy was married Mollie was in the Philippines, living the life of an army officer’s wife.
    Two years younger than Mollie was Jay—Joseph, but always known as Jay. He was unable to finish prep school, and had lived almost all his life, from the time he developed a case of T. B., in New Mexico. He was at work on a monumental history of the Church and the Indian in the Southwest.
    There would have been a child between Jay and Nancy, but it had been a Fallopian pregnancy from which Nancy’s mother almost died. This was kept from Nancy not only all through her girlhood, but even after she was married and had her own two children. Nancy did not know about her mother’s disastrous Fallopian pregnancy for the reason that her mother did not quite know how to explain it. It was kept quiet until Nancy’s little girl died in early infancy, and then Mrs. McBride told her. It infuriated Nancy to be told so late in life. It might not have made any difference in her attitude toward having children, but it gave her the feeling of having been insulted from a distance, this taciturnity of her mother’s. People ought to tell you things like that. Your own mother ought to tell you everything about that—and then she would recall that what ought to be and what actually was were two quite different things so far as her mother and sex were concerned. Mrs. McBride accepted the working theory of the Church that sex education of children was undesirable, unsanctioned; and when Nancy was fourteen her mother told her that “this is something that happens to girls”—and that was all she ever told her until Paul and Nancy were to be married. Then Mrs. McBride provided the second piece of information to her daughter: “Never let Paul touch you when you are unwell.” Whatever else Nancy learned was from the exchange of knowledge among school acquaintances, and from her secret reading of the informative little propaganda pamphlets which the government got out during the World War, telling in detail the atrocities which the Germans committed upon Belgian maidens, nuns, priests, old women. These pamphlets did not incite Nancy to turn her allowance into Liberty Bonds, but they made her understand things about her anatomy and the anatomy of the young men with whom she swam summer after summer on the South Shore of Long Island.
    Sex had been healthy and normally strong and only a trifle unpleasant for Nancy up to the time of the death of her daughter. Paul was considerate and tender and fun. Child-bearing, the incomparable peace of nursing the boys, the readjustment after the nursing periods—all were accomplished with a minimum of fright and pain, and sometimes with a pleasure