Now and then Gilbert would emerge from his bubble, breaking through the membrane, making something of the old contact with her, but Lilian grew accustomed to his distant manner. She now thought less of the difference from their courtship days, and instead felt it had always been this way.

She discovered anew what she’d learned other times and had forgotten: that something imagined one way could, if given time, turn out to be quite different, without the thing itself having changed a bit. It had happened with places, and things, and people, and she located its happening most specifically with Gilbert’s smile. When she’d first met him, the placid set of his mouth had been a beacon to her, but now after years of considering it, the smile seemed a sign of relinquishment, a closed door which would not open, a door which kept something behind it. Perhaps it held back sorrows, she could imagine that. They both had their sorrows, she supposed.

She did her best to look after her own business. She tried to spend an hour or two studying at her desk, following her mother’s technique of writing out questions on one page and the answers on another. One day, bent over in her study, she was startled by the sound of Rod clattering a wheelbarrow over the terrace bricks; she looked up at the needlepoint pillow on the opposite chair without recognizing where she was, more absorbed in the life of Saint Theresa than in anything else.

She would have liked to do something more, but what did she have talent for? She’d written verse when she was young, but Arthur was the writer. She thought of the elegant little speech he’d made at Jane’s wedding and the wonderful way he had of putting things, with certainty and a particular view. She loved looking at paintings, but could never draw a flower the way it looked, not like Irene Putnam, whose paintings looked like life only better. Dolly Vernon knew how to dress, and Marian Wiggin how to entertain, and even Jane was making use of her education — she’d been to junior college — and was teaching children.

Hildy had once said she had a talent for feeling, and Lilian thought wryly, What could one do with that? She could be a mother and a wife, which she was, but worried that she didn’t take the same delight in it the way Dolly or Marian or even Jane in her reserved, matter-of-fact way did. But who knew what went on in their minds. Perhaps they had some of the same thoughts — Lilian simply didn’t know.

One evening she went with Irene Putnam to Somerset Maugham’s The Circle. Lilian didn’t go often to the theatre, and felt hypnotized by the action.

You see what I mean, said Irene, and Lilian did.