“I take it you’ve chosen George Ogle for your flirt of the moment?”

“It’s harmless, after all. I relish his good looks, his strong shoulders.”

“I’m sure. For I doubt you’re able to relish his depth and humanity.”

For the first time I saw hurt on her face. But she turned up her nose and didn’t speak to me for a week. For that I was thankful.

When we moved house to Dublin in anticipation of summer, I felt some movement inside me, some change of season for myself. I had better apartments, a proper schoolroom, and the use of a private drawing room where I could receive visitors. I glimpsed a new form of life. Like daffodils pushing up through softened ground, ideas burst open inside me, so many I could scarcely arrange them. I read whenever I could, metaphysical sermons and philosophical lectures, and began to write the very novel Ogle and I had discussed, loosely based on my own life.

One night Lady K took me to a concert where we ran into George Ogle and his wife, an unexpected treat for me. I was surprised to find Elizabeth Ogle open and warm, almost proud of her husband’s own acute sensibility. It seemed she was not the source of his melancholy, nor did she believe it needed curing. She liked me simply because he did, with no jealousy at all. But seeing us in deep conversation, Lady K pounced at once. Now that I was something between her show toy and her rival, she couldn’t bear any intimacy between us, insisting the Ogles come around to visit her. Instead, separately and together, they visited me often, trying to arrange it when Lady K was on her social rounds. Occasionally I supped at their house for a lively hour or two of wit and rational conversation, and could hardly pull myself away. I liked his great faults, and her little ones. It was a place to air my heart, to express my sometimes crumbling yet grasping faith, my attraction to my own demise.

“Speaking of demise, how fares your Gothic heroine?” George Ogle asked of my novel in progress.

“Well, I’ve decided, after some deliberation, to call her Mary.”

“Your life is just like a novel!” said Mrs. Ogle. “Why, the pages of your life seem to turn themselves.”

“And I’ve given her a mother not unlike Lady K.”

“Mmm. A revenge well-deserved,” she said.

We three found communion in railing at her flaws, laughing at her puerility. Condemned her for wanting the patina of high-mindedness and the flush of deep feeling without any of the effort. But even as I said the words, new sympathies started up inside me.