With a sniffle, she lifted her head back up again. "He isn't a drunkard, and he didn't beat either of us, though sometimes I think it would've been better if he had. He works hard and he's done pretty well for himself, career-wise. He even married above his station: my mother, Honoria Du Rendal, is descended from some old-blood noble family, though she's far removed from any remaining wealth and she's basically never had anything for herself, which is I guess why she kept making frivolous purchases and dumb investments. But he's just such a damned glad-hoofer; he trusts that every problem his family had on shore will sort itself out on its own. I could never get through to him how bad things were with mom running the household in his absence -- and they sometimes got pretty bad. There was a week where my mother sent me out to basically beg for scraps to feed us, because she'd yet again wasted his sailor's pay on some ludicrously obvious fraud investment. And I was only a filly, then. Ponies were always taking advantage of my mother, one way or another, and he didn't care to hear it, let alone lift a hoof to try to put a stop to it. Later, when I started to rebel by skipping out on school and hanging with a tough crowd, he barely reacted at all -- even after my mother raised the alarm about it."