She may have been a millionairess technically speaking, but she worried a great deal about money in the way that persons with a primitive sense of economics and Fate worry about money: helplessly, despairingly, in frenzied bouts unrelated to actions or decisions. She was superstitious as well: she told Monica in all seriousness that a “good” year for her art always signaled a “bad” year for her life, and vice versa; and if her paintings sold well in a specific year it simply meant that, the following year, Internal Revenue would demand a costly audit. (“They hated my husband and they hate me,” she told Monica, white-lipped with passion. “They want to destroy artists because they hate art—they want to drain us all dry.”) Morton had died six years before and his financial affairs were only now being sorted out. It was all hell, it was sheer chaos, she kept from running berserk only by tossing things into drawers, not opening envelopes with certain return addresses, handing everything over to her accountants in Philadelphia two or three times a year. (But she couldn’t trust her accountants either. She had inherited them from Morton who hadn’t trusted them but had resigned himself to their tricks.) So far as Edgemont was concerned—the house was one hundred fifty years old, many of the outbuildings were a century old, everything was in continual need of repair, not only actual repair but the contemplation of repairs to come, and she didn’t have the time to think about such petty things, she didn’t have the energy, the spirit, nor could she trust local contractors—they were notorious for gouging widows. Morton had quarreled with virtually every contractor in the area anyway, so if she wanted work done—if she even wanted estimates made—she would have to find someone a considerable distance away. But she couldn’t trust strangers either. . . . (Monica said, laughingly, “But who can you trust, Sheila?” and Sheila said, unsmiling, seeing no joke in the question, “I really don’t know.”)