the Dean-of-Females office: Mario's earnest question

Mario asks the one question that matters with zero irony — pure single-entendre — and Avril answers in fluent clinical register, filing the condition (her own son's, her own husband's) as detached observation: "There may be some persons who are born imprisoned. The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness's expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful." The mother deploys the very word — "the irony, of course" — to hold the sadness at arm's length as a fact about hypothetical others, while Mario's un-ironic directness keeps trying to reach the actual sad person in the room. Single-entendre inquiry against performed clinical wellness. (The family-system substance is family-hamlet's, BUILT in batch 10; only the register contrast is taken here.)