Time weighed so . . . curiously on Sheila’s hands now, she fell into the habit of telephoning Monica at odd hours. Just to say hello. Just to hear Monica’s voice. (She was lonely, she confessed—“in fact greedy”—for a human voice.) Or she drove to New York City on business . . . but returned that very day, late at night. Her nerves were worn raw, she said, by the city: she simply couldn’t take the excitement and she refused, she categorically refused, to tranquilize herself the way her friends did. Then again she planned to spend ten days in Puerto Rico with an old dear friend, but never managed to book a flight; she spoke vaguely but with a nagging persistence of taking Monica with her to Morocco, to Tangier, for six weeks. That was a place to see, Sheila claimed. And what people she knew there!—not the sort Monica spent her days with, at the Academy.

“Morocco?” Monica said. “Tangier?—of course I can’t go, Sheila. My spring break is one week, not six.”

Sheila didn’t seem to hear. “If it’s money you’re worrying about,” she said carelessly, “I’ll take care of the plane tickets and expenses. All the expenses. In any case we’ll be staying with friends of mine, not at a hotel. You’ll love their villa on the water—it’s primitive but beautiful.”

“It isn’t money,” Monica said, hurt. “You must know it isn’t money.”

Sheila was bullying, Sheila was apprehensive. She fell into the habit of pacing about in Monica’s company, restless, joking, telling long convoluted anecdotes, her monologues pitched high enough to be funny—often supremely funny—so that it was easy to overlook their underlying despair.

What was wrong? why wasn’t she working? wasn’t she working?

She never quite heard Monica’s questions.

She would drop by at Monica’s house with a surprise gift of food, gourmet food, from an Olcottsville store—a lovely caviar pie, a great hefty wedge of Stilton cheese, a French country pâté worth its weight in gold—and two bottles of Algerian wine (bought, as Sheila happily boasted, at a remarkable discount): ignoring Monica’s smiling protestations that she had a great deal of work to prepare for the following day, and she hoped to get to bed early.

No matter, no matter: Sheila was lonely, Sheila was restless, Sheila was hilarious: in one of her exuberant moods.