I’ve been unfair to you, Gilbert. She saw a dim shadow of worry on his face.

What do you mean exactly?

I’ve made us unhappy.

I don’t think so, Lily. I’ve found my unhappiness all on my own, he said. You have always been fair and honest with me. I don’t have any complaints.

Now at last she could show him he was wrong, and confess it, or could continue the lie and preserve them. Some marriages are built as much on lies as on truths.

You wouldn’t complain, would you? was all she said in the end.

It’s as I said.

She went over to her desk and noticed that her things were not as she had left them. The girls have been playing in here again, she said absently.

What’s that? He was standing at the door, his drink spilling a little, papers under one arm. I’m going up, he said.

Fine, she said dimly. A red coal burned in the grate.

She glanced at her engagement book: a visit to Mrs. Sears tomorrow, tea at Amy Clark’s, the luncheon club on Wednesday. The life in store for her would unfold much as the engagement book had it. And one day — she could not know it then — the grandchildren would come, surprising her with their long hair and disheveled clothes, their cheeks smooth like hers, and while she knew young people were always the same — it was the older ones who varied depending on their time — she’d find it hard to recall what youth had been. When she thought of how it had felt to be young it would seem far off, belonging to another person.

She went and sat down in Gilbert’s chair, feeling both exhausted and wide awake. There on his little table she saw something which made her sit up: there was a book of matches from the Copley Plaza. He must have picked them up at Cap Sedgwick’s victory party the week before. She took them up and remembered the clerk saying there was a gentleman … No, it couldn’t have been Gilbert. Suddenly, she wasn’t so sure.

The solace of a moment earlier, that she would be left alone, that Gilbert’s solitude corresponded to her own, vanished.

She had already decided: I’m staying. I don’t have to like it, and if you come right down to it, I won’t. But at least I won’t moon after things. My parents did not raise me to behave like a fool.

She turned out the lights and went to the window, looking past the curtains at the sky. No stars. It was a cloudy night. Really, she thought, feeling quite hollowed out, would the sky look so different anywhere else?

She went up the stairs.