She had intended to spend the morning working on some preliminary sketches for one of her commissions. Her reputation for innovative work had not been gained overnight, and she could not afford to completely abandon her work, no matter how much she would have liked to spend the time on other things. Such as reading her mother's diaries. She put down her pencil but did not reach for a fresh one. What was it about the diaries that made them such compulsive reading? Reading them was like opening a door into an unknown world… The world of her mother as a young woman… as an equal with problems and pressures to which she herself could so easily relate. Why, when she had never been able to get close to her mother, was she now discovering that beneath the label of 'mother' and 'devoted wife' which she had pinned to her there was a fellow woman, someone for whom she could feel compassion and understanding? Did her mother know how much was revealed in her diaries?
