So when, at the Greenes’ spirited party, she had happened to see a tall, dark-haired, rather slovenly dressed woman enter the room, Monica had thought only that she was odd—arresting—a “character” in some not fully tangible way. She was a woman five or six years older than Monica, in her midthirties perhaps, and attractive enough, even—almost—beautiful, with derisive black eyes and heavy unplucked black brows and a wide, unsmiling, quizzical mouth. Her figure was almost painfully angular; her shoulders were sloping, her posture slouched. Unlike the Greenes’ other guests she had not taken the occasion seriously enough to dress for it—she wore a shapeless black skirt that fell unevenly to midcalf, and a cheap much-laundered cotton shirt, and what appeared to be a man’s tweed jacket, unbuttoned, and drooping from her thin shoulders. An odd bird of prey, Monica thought, maneuvering where she could observe the woman more easily.

She wore flat-heeled shoes of no discernible style, mud- or paint splattered; and her legs, pale and luminous, and somewhat sinewy, seemed to be bare. Her stride was brash, perhaps horsey—she was certainly a horsewoman or a sportswoman of some kind—she leaned forward to shake hands, jerking her elbow downward in an unusual manner, not feminine (whatever, Monica thought, feminine precisely means) but not masculine either: rather in the style of a self-conscious and slightly sulky adolescent. There was something edgy about her, something mirthless yet jocular, an air of the improvisational and the uncoordinated: she had pinned a white camellia to her untidy hair in a romantic (or a mock-romantic) gesture, but the flower now hung wilted and forgotten as if about to fall. While Harry and Ruth Greene turned their animated attention upon her she frankly surveyed the room, rocking on her heels, her hands inelegantly thrust into her pockets. Alone in this chattering smiling crowd she was unsmiling and appeared to be replying to the Greenes in monosyllables. Monica supposed her a guest of no little significance, judging from the attention paid her by the headmaster and his wife—and now the chaplain and his wife—and several other persons of importance. Perhaps she was the wife of a trustee or a trustee herself, Monica thought, though she was rather young for the role. No doubt she lived on one of the splendid country estates in the area, no doubt she rode thoroughbred horses; there was something arrogant about her stance, the slight, almost imperceptible bend of her knees. . . . She was clearly well-to-do and assured, the kind of woman Monica usually avoided.