When Mary started talking to him while she helped her mother-law in the kitchen, Thomas had discovered that he had a hard time discerning just who was speaking to him. The only thing that gave him a clue was the fact that Mary was speaking from their kitchen. His mother’s voice and Mary’s voice were so alike as to defy any differentiation of the difference unless the two of them were in the same room together.

Strangely, Mary had always seemed to Thomas like an interloper who felt bound and determined to destroy his delicate relationship with his mother. She was intensely jealous of Thomas’s relationship with his mother and made her feelings clear to Thomas. Mary felt that Thomas had married her and that he should have shifted his allegiance to her alone. Thomas’s intimate relationship with his mother didn’t permit him to abandon his feelings for her and he resisted Mary’s attempts to separate them. Although his mother disapproved of Mary as Thomas’s wife, made no such attempts to break up their marriage.