If she went to Alan now it would be like detaching one of these cut-outs of a woman, and forcing it to walk separately from the rest, but once detached from the unison, it would reveal that it was a mere outline of a woman, the figure design as the eye could see it, but empty of substance, this substance having evaporated through the spaces between each layer of the personality. A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into numberless silhouettes, and she could see this apparent form of Sabina leaving a desperate and a lonely one walking the streets in quest of hot coffee, being greeted by Alan as a transparently innocent young girl he had married ten years before and sworn to cherish, as he had, only he had continued to cherish the same young girl he had married, the first exposure of Sabina, the first image delivered into his hands, the first dimension, of this elaborated, complex and extended series of Sabinas which had been born later and which she had not been able to give him. Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new ring of growth, she should have been able to say: "Alan, here is a new version of Sabina. Add it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace her, hold them all at once in your arms, or else, divided, separated, each image will live a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or eight Sabinas who will walk sometimes in unison, by a great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep drumming into forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young man, and still another opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald." Was this the crime to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to match each one in turn by a different life?

Oh, she was tired, but it was not from loss of sleep, or from talking too much in a smoke-filled room, or from eluding Jay's caricatures, or Mambo's reproaches, or Philip's distrust of her, or because Donald by his behavior so much like a child had made her feel that her thirty years were a grandmother's age. She was tired of pulling these disparate fragments together. She understood Jay's paintings too. It was perhaps at such a moment of isolation that Madame Bovary had taken the poison. It was the moment when the hidden life is in danger of being exposed, and no woman could bear the condemnation.

But why should she fear exposure? At this moment Alan was deeply asleep, or quietly reading if he were not asleep.

Was it merely this figure of a lie detector dogging her steps which caused her so acute an anxiety?

Guilt is the one burden human beings cannot bear alone.