Sheila appeared gratified by the invitation but declined it. She had only ridden over, she said, on a whim, a kind of glimmering of . . . but she didn’t know what: was Monica interested in horses? Somehow she had had the erroneous idea that . . . hadn’t someone told her . . .

Monica said hesitantly that she did have an interest in horses, in learning to ride. But she’d never had lessons. And she was probably rather uncoordinated and out of condition. . . .

Sheila smiled one of her brusque ticlike smiles and said, not altogether tactfully, that Monica was past the age for riding lessons, for any kind of serious commitment to riding. “You should be a young adolescent,” she said. “Twelve, thirteen years old. That’s when it begins. That’s when the urge starts. You find that you want to grip a horse between your legs and it’s a passion, a sudden passion, chaste, exquisite, almost religious. All the horses are stallions—even the mares. You could ride and ride all day and at night you dream about riding, about the horse, your horse. A few years later it starts to fade, this passion. It gradually disappears in most girls. With some of us, with me, for instance, it becomes a lifelong preoccupation, but you’re the kind of girl, I suspect, in which it would have faded long ago.”

Monica, faintly shocked, laughed at her guest’s outspoken manner—this peculiar combination of rudeness and solicitude. “I see. I see,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

Sheila was pacing again about the room, her hands on her hips, her stride loping, boyish. She examined the lighting fixtures which, she said, the Dorrs had had installed: but neither of them had much taste. She examined the ornate plaster moldings, the marble mantel (cracked in two places) above the fireplace, and the aluminum-framed print from the Museum of Modern Art above that, a brightly colored, airy, shadowless Bonnard for which, suddenly, Monica felt some subtle shame. It was a poor choice, surely? But what would Sheila Trask have suggested?

Monica watched her, fascinated, amused. She had tracked dirt onto the carpet without noticing, she’d left the row of paperback books disturbed. Her insolence was remarkable; but one couldn’t take offense—for there she was, simply and defiantly herself. She displaced a great deal of air. She was assuredly not modest. Soiled jodhpurs, unshaven underarms, horsey scent, the sloe eyes quick-darting and shamelessly inquisitive. . . . In the slanted light from one of the high windows, however, rose-tinted by damask curtains Monica had hung only the day before, she looked quite beautiful: even gravely and uncannily beautiful.

But it was only for an instant. Immediately she turned, continued her pacing, her disjointed remarks.

(Indeed, as Monica was to remember afterward, Sheila’s conversation became increasingly directionless and antic at this point.)

She expressed the hope, rather vaguely and hurriedly, that Monica would visit her at Edgemont soon. For dinner perhaps.