Monica liked him. She wanted to like him. She could see clearly that both James Starkie and his wife were genuine Christians, forthright, sunny, not at all hypocritical, possessed of the good news of salvation, the Good News of the Gospels—they were old-fashioned, unembarrassed, the real thing. Certainly they meant well. They meant good. And if she hadn’t Sheila Trask she would have been grateful for their frequent invitations to dinner and their general solicitude. (Early in the fall Jill had invited her to lunch to tell her that she shouldn’t worry about being lonely in Glenkill because it was impossible to be lonely—the Glenkill faculty and students were all one family. “I mean we really are,” Jill said. “It’s only that new instructors sometimes feel a little left out—excluded—simply because they’re new to the family, and worried, you know, worried—” here she flailed about for a moment, clearly in awkward waters, “—about being kept on, that sort of thing. But it’s just because they’re new.” She had reached out to squeeze Monica’s hand, as if impulsively; she was leaning so close, and smiling so happily, Monica halfway worried that she would suddenly embrace her. But she only said: “I know that won’t be the case with you, Maura, I mean Monica, because you’re basically not the type at all, I mean to be excluded and lonely, to stand off to the side making critical judgments; you’re more like me—I could see from the first that you’re more like me.”)

Monica was hoping that the subject of Sheila Trask would be dropped but Brian Farley, the chairman of her department, persisted. He was a bull-necked solid man in his midfifties, handsome in a somewhat pocked and battered way, known on campus for his wit, his “remarkable erudition,” his admiration for Evelyn Waugh. He sometimes affected a slightly British drawl and he had begun to resemble Waugh about the eyes. He asked Monica pointedly what Edgemont looked like on the inside: was Sheila Trask keeping things up, or letting things go, as rumor had it?—after all, the woman had a certain responsibility as “mistress” of a house like that.

Monica said quietly that she wasn’t a judge of such matters but so far as she knew Edgemont was in excellent condition. Of course Sheila had her own work, her energies were channeled almost exclusively into her own work—“she isn’t a museum curator, after all, or the priestess at a shrine.”