The women greeted each other, they shook hands, they smiled awkwardly, spoke a few words, fell silent. Monica’s head was pounding and Sheila herself was visibly agitated.

Finally Sheila said in a low, rapid voice, “You aren’t exactly overjoyed to see me, are you.”

Monica laughed nervously. “Aren’t I—?”

Sheila was regarding her with a sly shy half-smile, her head turned to one side as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to look directly at Monica. Her voice was elated, accusing, “And I’ve been gone for so long: and you haven’t missed me.”

Monica denied it, laughing again. Her face had gone strangely hot; her eyes were burning; she was nearly overcome by an impulse to strike Sheila with her fist—a child’s greeting, playful, yet hard enough to hurt. Yes, in play: but hard enough to hurt.

“I don’t blame you,” Sheila said, expelling a cloud of smoke in a sudden heavy sigh. “I would have come back earlier, you know—except—I was afraid of your anger—your judgment. Yet I don’t blame you,” she said in a musing voice.

Monica was no longer certain what they were talking about. She said, rather too briskly, “Well—it’s good to see you back. To have you back. How was your stay in Morocco? Did you—”

But Monica’s words trailed off into silence, as if she had lost the thread of her own remark; and Sheila did not seem to hear. She was picking a bit of tobacco off her tongue, flicking it away. Sheila said vaguely, “And how have you been, here? I suppose you’ve been—working—teaching— And seeing people—”

“Yes,” said Monica. “A good many people.”

Sheila was dressed extravagantly in jodhpurs, riding boots, a burgundy wool cape that fell rakishly to her ankles. Her thick hair was gathered into a casual twist at the back of her head; stray wisps blew across her forehead and into her eyes. She was a striking woman even in this stark wintry glare, which threw its bluish light upward, shadowing the eyes, emphasizing tucks and creases about the mouth, draining the skin of its color. Lean and angular and impatient, with the air of being sharp as a knife blade; a curious blend of audacity and humility—even self-abasement; Sheila Trask with her black rapacious eyes, the too-heavy brows, the fleshy mouth with its uncertain smile. Monica remembered having thought, in Sheila’s studio, beneath that pitiless skylight, that beauty is after all only a matter of light; of gradations of light; degrees of seeing. But now, staring at Sheila, lost in contemplation of Sheila, she realized that Sheila’s beauty had nothing to do with accidents of light, or gradations of clarity, or Monica’s own rapt vision. It was there, Sheila was there, supremely herself.