"Oh, she's not so bad," Don Juan replied with a shrug. He'd taken the comment about not somebody you would want to be cross with you to be a slightly more polite way of saying she was a harpy without the feathers — in other words, as a wholly negative remark. If Thomasina had a reputation for being a battle-axe he supposed it mostly came from people watching her fight with Ozymandias in public. She was rather polite otherwise, he usually found — but with enough vicious high-profile arguments in public he supposed it didn't matter so much what one was usually like. (Maybe the same was true for him — maybe he had done enough high-profile terrible things by now that he could be as circumspect as a lamb at parties and still keep the same reputation. He wasn't as circumspect as a lamb, and had no intention of becoming so, but it was an interesting thought experiment).

"Oz makes her out to be worse than she is," he continued. "Anyway, I think she'd only pretend to be cross with me. I bet she'd think it was at least a little funny, even if she didn't admit to it." Maybe he was projecting there; he wasn't actually so well acquainted with his sister-in-law that he could guess what she was thinking behind her reactions. He thought Porphyria would find it funny, though, and he thought Porphyria and Thomasina had more in common than most people would have guessed.

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