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You probably would not remember, since you never seemed to remember even the same moments as I, much less their intensity, one sunny midday on Fifth Avenue when you had set out with me for some final shopping less than a week before the wedding you staged for me with such reluctance at the Farm.

I can see us now.

We had been walking quite briskly, for despite your being so small and me so tall, your stride in those days could easily match mine.

We had stopped before a shop window to assess its autumnal display, when you suddenly turned to me, looking up from beneath one of your wrong hats, and with your nervous `` ahem ''!!

Said: `` There are things I must tell you about this man you are marrying which he does not know himself ''.

If you had screamed right there in the street where we stood, I could not have felt more fear.

With scarcely a mumble of excuse, I fled.

I fled, however, not from what might have been the natural fear of being unable to disguise from you that the things about my bridegroom -- in the sense you meant the word `` things '' -- which you had been galvanizing yourself to tell me as a painful part of your maternal duty were things which I had already insisted upon finding out for myself ( despite, I may now say, the unspeakable awkwardness of making the discovery on principle, yes, on principle, and in cold blood ) because I was resolved, as a modern woman, not to be a mollycoddle waiting for Life but to seize Life by the throat.

I had developed too foolproof a facade to be afraid of self-betrayal.

What I fled from was my fear of what, unwittingly, you might betray, without meaning to, about my father and yourself.