MARY CASSATT AT THE DINER
She was young and her children very young. She had agreed to meet her husband’s anxious student-lover in a back booth and had stayed for the duration of her babysitter’s hour (though half of it would have been enough) to hear an earnest exposition on the reasons for her husband’s dissatisfaction, is need to bed attractive women, the necessity of his having a real wife, a wife without professional ambition, in order that his objective correlative life might teem with the sensory stimuli so crucial to his art. It made a certain amount of sense, looked at from that viewpoint, dispassionately. Sipping pale tepid tea from a thick white cup, the saucer of which rested near a vase of roadside chicory, she thought of the wives of the Impressionists.
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