On the marble-patterned wallpaper, the shadow of a cloud moved across the shadow of the window and the cold room grew colder.

“But I thought Martha was the love of your life. What’s happened?”

“It’s not like I thought it would be. It’s not like when we were in the hospital.”

Gretchen pulled a handkerchief from her trouser pocket and ground it into the corners of her eyes.

“Well of course it isn’t!” Jean cried. “You were just a girl then.”

“Martha tries to be kind. She loves me, I know she does, but she’s in so much pain it makes her short-tempered. And she hates teaching but she can’t give it up because there’d be no money. And she gets so jealous.”

“Of whom?”

“Not even of real people—not people we know, anyway. We never see any other people! If I read a book she is jealous of Carson McCullers or Rosamond Lehmann. Or if I listen to music she is jealous of Schubert.”

“You make her sound quite demented.”

“She admits it. She says she is jealous of the gloves I wear. But that wouldn’t matter if only she liked Margaret a little more.”

“And Margaret senses it.”

“Yes, of course. Between the two of them they are pulling me in half. But Martha doesn’t understand how painful it is because she’s not a mother.”

“But you must have known it would make Margaret miserable. I tried to tell you.” She had to resist the urge to say: “It’s too late. He doesn’t want you anymore.”

“I thought love could overcome everything.”

“Then you’re a fool,” said Jean.

“And so are you,” that stern inner voice, Duty, with its clinging gray skirts and sturdy shoes, reminded her. Hadn’t she passed the last few weeks hoping and dreaming much the same thing?

“I can’t stay here. I just want to go home.”

Jean felt a pressure in her chest as though something heavy had been dropped on it from a height. Blood pounded in her ears.

“It’s easy to say you want to go back to the way things were. But it’s like unmaking a cake. Not everything done can be undone.”

“Or you could say it’s like mending a torn shirt—it might not be quite the same as before but it’s still a shirt.”

“If it’s against your nature to feel anything for men, how is that ever going to work—for either of you?”

Jean had to pick her words delicately, without betraying anything Howard had confided about his years of unhappy celibacy.

“I want to be a proper wife to him. For Margaret’s sake. I’ll do whatever is necessary. Isn’t that what you told me when you first came here to try to persuade me to come home? That the most important thing was Margaret? You did.”

“Yes . . .”

“We were happier than a lot of married couples. And we can be again. I’ll be a good wife, like I was at the beginning. If you could just tell him how miserable I am and that I ask for his forgiveness. I know he’d forgive me if he could see how sorry I am.”