(A number of artists evidently lived in Bucks County at the present time. None was so famous as Andrew Wyeth, who lived in Chadds Ford, some distance to the south, but their names were nonetheless mentioned occasionally, as if by accident: conversational nuggets that might be examined, and contemplated, or allowed to be dropped, depending upon one’s inclination. The gentlemen who had taken Monica to lunch at an inn on the Delaware River, and who had interviewed her for two hours, so discreetly and casually she might have mistaken the experience for a mere social encounter, brought up Sheila Trask’s name; and the name of her late husband Flaxman. Fortunately for Monica she knew Flaxman’s work—knew enough to say a few intelligent and appreciative things about it, though she wasn’t unstintingly enthusiastic: the heavy white masses, the unbroken lines and featureless curves, the mere semblance of living, primitive forms, had always vaguely troubled her, weighed upon her vision, as she sat with a cooling cup of tea—one cup after another, in fact—in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, trying to find a way out of the cul-de-sac of her life. But at least she could envision something when Flaxman’s name was mentioned; so far as Sheila Trask was concerned—she could envision nothing at all. And as she looked from Mr. Greene, the headmaster of the school, to Mr. Farley, who chaired the English Department, Monica could not determine whether this readily admitted ignorance was in her favor or against her. “Miss Trask’s paintings are experimental, I suppose it might be said,” Mr. Greene said, smiling, “—powerful—and abstract—and difficult to describe.” Monica murmured, not quite apologetically, that she knew very little about contemporary art, either American or European—she was afraid she found most of it flat, inhuman, sterile, and oddly unimaginative. “Yes. Exactly,” Mr. Greene said.)