Now it began to seem that Sheila was absent from her studio more often; that she was markedly less absorbed in her work, and unwilling to talk about it. What she did talk about was fragmentary and jumbled. One day she said contemptuously that money engenders money—“the wheels keep on turning, ever more frantically, after you die”—but the next day she spoke of financial worries, her old anxieties, redoubled. Evidently (so Monica gathered) there was another tax audit. Or a gallery owner was suspected (by Sheila? by Sheila’s lawyer?) of cheating her. Or a friend, a former friend, wanted to borrow more money, and neglected to specify what sort of interest he would pay.

“Do people borrow money from you regularly?” Monica asked.

“Not regularly,” Sheila said, laughing. “I’m not a bank, after all.”

But, yes, there were friends, former friends, artist acquaintances, people from the old days, the early years, Morton had oscillated between helping them out (“He was enormously generous, it was a form of his contempt”) and telling them to go to hell; and Sheila of course had inherited them.

“It isn’t in my nature to say ‘no,’” Sheila said. “But it makes me ill to keep on saying ‘yes.’”

If Monica questioned her more closely, however, or offered to deal with one or another of these “friends” for Sheila, Sheila abruptly changed the subject.

Was she restless, edgy, ill-tempered?—cursed with a perpetual headache? It had nothing to do with her work, she said defensively, or with her private life: it was just December: the approach of the solstice: the malaise of relentlessly darkening days and relentlessly lengthening nights. Too many gunmetal-gray skies boring a hole in the top of her skull.

Monica said, almost too brightly: “‘There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons— / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes—’”

“Yes,” Sheila said, narrowing her eyes, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand, “—you’ve got it, friend.”

Now she had time, a great deal of time, it seemed, to spend with Monica.

Time for sudden lunches in the village (at the tiny pretentious Soup du Jour, at the Glenkill Diner where workingmen ate) when Monica had barely an hour between classes, and was breathless, exhilarated, gratified (ah, she couldn’t deny it!) to be seen about town, so companionably, and, as it were, casually, with Sheila Trask. They no longer met in the Academy faculty club, however, because Monica was rather jealous of her friend’s attention: she didn’t want her colleagues joining them, or overhearing their conversations and repeating them elsewhere. And Sheila liked to dress in old paint-splattered clothes much of the time. And she laughed loudly if something struck her as amusing. And of course Monica could never tell beforehand what sort of mood Sheila might be in.