She acquired a credit card and insisted upon using it when she and Monica were together. (Occasionally the two women met for lunch at the pretentious Olcottsville Inn, where Sheila was deferred to as “Mrs. Flaxman” and treated with a solemnity she found amusing; at other times, dressed in jeans and sweaters, they drove out to a country tavern on Highway 29. Early on in their friendship they fell into the custom of meeting in Glenkill’s sole Chinese restaurant on Wednesday evenings, since Wednesday was Monica’s most arduous day at school: she began teaching at seven forty-five in the morning and wasn’t finished with various extracurricular duties until nearly six in the evening.) Impulsively, Sheila bought Monica presents—a beautiful Shetland sweater, a pair of hand-tooled leather boots, a four-foot-high orange tree in a wooden tub. (“It would look so beautiful in that alcove in your dining room.”) Monica was embarrassed to accept these gifts, more embarrassed to refuse them, and it seemed virtually impossible to make Sheila understand that her charity was patronizing. “Don’t you know,” Monica said, hesitantly, painfully, “—it’s impolite to suggest that I’m so much poorer than you are?”

“I don’t see that it’s either ‘impolite’ or ‘polite,’” Sheila said stiffly. “It happens to be true, doesn’t it?”

But if Monica countered by giving Sheila something it was invariably the wrong thing: a pair of hand-knit gloves from Turkey which turned out to be so crudely fashioned that Sheila couldn’t force them on her hands, a Scarlatti recording that interested her so little she scarcely glanced at it, and would have left it behind in Monica’s kitchen if Monica hadn’t called after her. And Monica’s most ambitious—and expensive—purchase, a book of photographs of Antarctica by Eliot Porter, must have been similarly unappreciated: Monica noted it lying on a table in Sheila’s studio, week after week, always in the same position, untouched.

Sometimes it happened that though Sheila invited Monica to Edgemont for dinner she found that she couldn’t stop work—she needed just another hour, another two hours—but she begged Monica not to go away: she’d be terribly lonely if she went away: couldn’t she wander about the house or the property, couldn’t she find a quiet place somewhere to read, or even do a little work of her own . . . ? Sheila’s nerves were at so high a pitch, her color so flushed, Monica was rather more flattered than hurt: it struck her as extraordinary, that this remarkable woman should have taken an interest in her.

She was even responsible—so Sheila said—for “lightening” the tone of one of her canvases, the last in a thematic series she was preparing for a show. “It’s your influence—your blond aura,” Sheila said. “It really has made a significant difference.”