There was nothing in her life, she came by degrees to see, that corresponded to Sheila’s work and to her monomaniacal faith in her work. Even Sheila’s marriage, turbulent as it probably had been, was a far more fruitful and significant marriage than Monica’s. (She fairly writhed with shame to think of “Harold Bell” set beside “Morton Flaxman.” Dear God, if Sheila had ever met Harold—! Self-important and industrious as a bright undergraduate, quick, clever, intermittently “brilliant”—as his professors in Bloomington had praised him—but conventional in imagination, even in ambition. Monica remembered him frowning and squinting at himself in the mirror while shaving, as if he were gravely displeased by what he saw, an ordinary handsome face, his hair already thinning by the age of twenty-seven, eyes set too close together. “Do you think my eyes are set too close together?” he had asked Monica once, in an odd, vulnerable mood, and Monica had said, amused, “Of course not—what a peculiar thing to ask.”)

Sheila’s passion, Sheila’s mercurial moods. . . . Nothing in Monica’s life corresponded: nothing that was Jensen made any claim for the extraordinary. Yet Sheila queried her, nearly interrogated her, what sort of childhood had she had, was her family religious, what was it like to grow up in Wrightsville, Indiana, what was her first experience with death?—with sex? And how had she known she was “in love” with the man she eventually married? (Monica drew her forefinger unconsciously along her jaw, stroking the scar, thinking, thinking very hard, feeling her cheeks burn with the incongruity of her friend’s interest and her own meager resources. She heard herself saying things she wasn’t certain were altogether true: yes she had thought her body ugly in early adolescence, yes she had been frightened and humiliated by menstruation, yes she had feared she might bleed to death. . . . Yes she did sometimes think of madness: doesn’t everyone? And death. Madness and death. Doesn’t everyone?)

Monica knew secretly that her capacity for love—for love and what is meant by “passion”—was deficient set beside Sheila Trask’s; she knew that Sheila was exaggerating her warmth, her good nature, her “blond optimism”—the attributes, mysterious and somewhat patronizing, she claimed to find in Monica. Was it flattering, or was it subtly comical, that Sheila Trask of all persons should regard her with awe simply because she navigated a day—a not atypical day—of classes, committee meetings, conferences with students, an obligatory coffee hour in the headmaster’s residence, and so forth: while Sheila had spent these hours in her studio staring at one canvas after another, seeing no connection between them, no logical relationship, visited by no impulse to work, overcome by a sensation of melancholy and paralysis. At such times, Sheila said, she believed she might be on the planet Jupiter: the gravity so much more powerful, murderous.