It would have pained her beautiful heart to think that there was a living thing that would go through life unloved and she was compensating for that with a special, deliberate effort to love it. In the same way, when her son was born after two miscarriages and almost didn’t make it, she had promised that if he survived she would not expect or ask any more from him for his whole life than that. And that is why she had accepted Hungry Paul as he was and let him follow his natural, meandering course through life as her sunfish.
