To make peace with her life she had to believe that she had everything she could ever want, that she suffered no happiness-precluding privations or deficiencies. To countenance her exploitation would be to invite in a disgruntlement that her exploitation had rendered her powerless to do anything about. Alistair had observed this same dynamic, this same self-deluding, self-sparing contentment, in practically every middle-class person he’d ever met. But to observe it in his mother, the most intelligent person he knew, was particularly painful.
