We ate for awhile. Mother sent Dilsey to the front to look for Quentin again.

“I keep telling you she’s not coming to dinner,” I says.

“She knows better than that,” Mother says, “She knows I dont permit her to run about the streets and not come home at meal time. Did you look good, Dilsey?”

“Dont let her, then,” I says.

“What can I do,” she says. “You have all of you flouted me. Always.”

“If you wouldn’t come interfering, I’d make her mind,” I says. “It wouldn’t take me but about one day to straighten her out.”

“You’d be too brutal with her,” she says. “You have your Uncle Maury’s temper.”