Standing there, mute and ashamed, I knew instinctively and for all time why Isabel Newbury disliked my mother, and it had nothing at all to do with her being a Wingo. Time had marked her early and cruelly with all the bend sinisters and cinquefoils of its inerasable heraldry. There was an aura of sickliness about her, the kind of decay that begins in the heart and works its way out to the eyes.
