Ardyth at her best

The holidays were so filled with social engagements—how odd for us!—that there was not even a half an hour to sit down and recollect. Ardyth was throughout at her best. She looked, with the additional ten pounds put on in the past two months, at her very, very best. Calm, enchanting, endearing and beautiful as ever a woman, and so witty. Not one single outbreak of Irish anger in all these days, full of plans and good intentions. Whenever people fall for her charms, she becomes frightened and confides later that she really does not love them as much as they might think she does and is afraid that some time sooner or later might be caught in anger and spoil the picture. Actually she never does, because what little of the deep, ever-whirling emotional pool of her comes to the surface, I am absorbing like a shock absorber, and she always makes up.

     --From her husband Egon's journal, New Year's Day 1948