And of course the answer to that was no. I should have been honest with Mary. Once I’d done that, once I’d got those secrets out of the way – who knows? – perhaps I would have begun to hear Gela herself more clearly, and learned to tell the difference between her voice and my own thoughts. But how could I ever have expected to hear her if I refused to listen even to myself ? How could I expect to open my mind to Gela if I closed it up to my best friend and teacher? Over and over, I asked myself these things. Of course, I knew perfectly well that the reason I hadn’t spoken to Mary about my secrets was that I was afraid of making her angry, afraid of her asking things of me that I’d find difficult to do. But as it turned out, she couldn’t possibly have been angrier if I had told her than she was when I didn’t, and she couldn’t possibly have made things harder for me either.

Sometimes I wondered if she’d known all along that I was keeping secrets. She was so smart about things like that, she had such sharp sharp eyes, and – who knows? – perhaps Gela herself had even told her. It was quite possible that Mary knew everything already and was just waiting for me to figure out what I had to do. It was a test, that was all, and not that hard a test either. If that was really so, no wonder Mary had been disappointed. It wasn’t because I didn’t hear Gela – she knew that was hard; she knew that took time – it was because I’d let her down.

And look where letting her down had taken me! Look what I’d become as a result. A low low woman who foraged and hunted for her living like a thousand other low people across the Davidfolk Ground, and lived among other low people who knew next to nothing, and didn’t matter to anyone except themselves.