No day passed without a visit from Rachel. At first pleased, Sarah began to wonder if it was not a bad thing, indicating as it did the girl’s lack of acceptance of her life at Oaks. When she and James were together with others, they were polite and quiet with one another, but the exuberance that had won Rachel as wife had deserted James when they settled down to every day. For all his appearance of heartiness, James was a shy man, unsure of himself in close relationships, and the more so with Rachel, knowing as he did that she continued to grieve for Adam.

In the middle of December they attended a large party at Annabel’s house in Highboro, but that was a rather stiff affair, since Annabel had no gift for making people welcome and comfortable but had only asked them to admire her and what was hers, and poor Blair had been bullied by her and their children into the kind of bland silence that people call seriousness, not amiss in a young banker.

There were other parties, and simple gatherings that were not called that. Sarah and Floyd went one day into the woods and cut a young pine tree, which Floyd brought back over his shoulder, and which Sarah decorated with help from Selma and Pauline, and suggestions from Nell and Penelope. With all the comings-together Sarah grew more and more troubled at the evidence that Rachel and James had not yet accepted each other as husband and wife.

Rachel was perfectly aware of how things stood. Although they slept in the same bed, she and James never touched each other once they had got into it. On the day he’d proposed marriage to her she had felt a first flicker of interest in him as a man, as opposed to her having known him as neighbor, friend, and near-brother. But married to him, something perverse in her made her want to punish him. It was as though, having satisfied convention and the two families, she rejected what she had done, for Adam’s sake.

She knew that James wanted to love her, and that knowledge made her despise him a little, gave her a feeling of unhappy superiority. With Adam she had been eager to please; with James, it did not matter. She thought of Adam and of his child that she would bear; and that was enough for her, and encouraged her to a sort of selfishness, or self-containment, pregnant women often feel.