Oh Russell, my darling, why must you do this, Miranda wondered, grieving above the plates and cups. Is it really going to help you to be away, to be without me? Will you really come back? She pushed her chair out from the table and wrapped her dressing gown about her, resting her hand for a moment against her body. It’s strange, she thought, that these trite expressions should have such meaning—“My heart bleeds”; “It cut me to the heart” … One does feel it here. Something to do, perhaps, with circulation or breathing.

“A very good color for you, Miranda, that pink,” Constance declared. She had a proprietary way of admiring other people’s possessions, as if all good taste were in some measure a tribute to herself. “Yes, an excellent color,” she repeated, in this flat, confiscating manner of hers, as Miranda trailed out of the dining room toward the kitchen. Then she looked adoringly at James, who was still eating his breakfast.

Constance’s husband had died in the war, shortly after James’s birth. The fact that she had, unaided, raised this remarkable young man was a daily source of gratification to her. James’s strong and subtle personality, his intelligence, his good looks would have more than met her own requirements. That he should, into the bargain, have turned out to be charming and kind was an unlooked-for bonus that, as far as Constance was concerned, simply vindicated his gifts in the eyes of a jealous society. He was so attractive, she sometimes thought, that he was really entitled to be a bit nasty; instead—magnanimously, she felt—he was very nice. He would go a long way—always in the right direction; they all said so, his professors, his college friends, even Russell. Russell himself had done well enough, until now, but James would do more. James was more singular, his talents less diffuse. If only, she prayed, if only he would get over these grotesque notions about Miranda. (Thank God Miranda herself hadn’t noticed yet.) It really couldn’t be worse, if the two of them were to be in the house all summer. “Poor little Miranda’s looking rather drawn, I thought,” she said.

“Seemed all right to me,” James replied. “Perhaps she’ll cheer up after Russell goes.”

Someone will cheer up anyway, Constance thought grimly, watching him. “She’d be better advised to cheer up beforehand. It only makes Russell worse to see her subdued like this.”

“Russell’s not exactly clamorous himself,” James pointed out. He wiped his hands on a paper napkin and left it in a ball on his plate. “And never has been.”

“All the more reason for Miranda to provide a little contrast … Proust, if you recall, says that Swann was instinctively repelled by the very women whose depth of character and melancholy expression exactly reflected his own.”

“I don’t, no.”

“Don’t what?”