She was waiting for Sheila to apologize; but even as she waited (thinking with an angry beating heart of her pleas to Sheila through that door—her pathetic attempts at humor, coercion) she knew that Sheila would never say a word. Sheila, hiding on the other side of a locked door, slightly crouched, head bowed, breathing hoarsely through her mouth. Sheila listening to her and saying not a word.

“Yes,” said Monica, “the visit went very well indeed. Except they put pressure on me to come back to Indiana, to teach there.”

“I don’t blame them,” Sheila said neutrally. “If they love you they must want you closer. It’s a long distance away, after all.”

Monica said nothing, nor did she look directly at Sheila.

“Suppose you’d died. . . .” she said suddenly, in a whisper. “Suppose I’d come too late and you had . . .”

Sheila turned away; Sheila said in a vague drifting voice, “Yes, I thought that was where you’d gone, home to visit your family. It was Christmas after all. . . .”

“Yes,” Monica said angrily. “Christmas.”

And the subject was never mentioned again.

5

Monica’s teaching was going well, Monica’s first year was quite a success, or would surely be, at the end of the term; yet she worried; wondered; calculated. What sort of future did she have at Glenkill? why hadn’t she been offered a three-year contract instead of a one-year renewable (as it was called)?—the rumor being that one of her young male colleagues had been offered a contract of this sort, and had signed up gratefully.

Was her status as a divorced woman a mark against her, she wondered.

Was there something perhaps unwise—imprudent—naive—about her very enthusiasm for teaching? She recalled an admonition of Harold’s that one’s colleagues invariably objected to too much enthusiasm: it put them in a bad light.

Sheila suggested that Monica was being exploited at the Glenkill Academy, by Greene and his “gang.” He was notorious, Sheila said. Pushing his junior faculty to the limit, expecting them to work for virtually nothing, paying them in school camaraderie, dinner parties, free tickets to basketball games. One big happy family, the Glenkill staff. One big happy family with Daddy at the head.

“You could almost do as well, penny by penny and hour by hour, working as a barmaid,” Sheila said, not very tactfully.

“But where else could I go,” Monica said lightly, “—where else could I be exploited in such congenial surroundings? By such attractive well-bred people?”

Another time, Sheila told Monica that she owed it to herself to take sick days off, now and then. As everyone else did. She was foolish to teach week after week without a break, as if it were to her credit, a measure of her stoicism. Also, Sheila had to drive to New York City on business and couldn’t bear the thought of driving alone and wouldn’t Monica like to join her. . . .