Out of politeness she asked Monica one or two questions about the house she had rented, and Monica’s answers were brief, shy, not very inspired. Ruth Greene, smiling and maternal, led another junior instructor forward to be introduced; there were more murmured exchanges; smiles, handshakes; a few awkward though well-intentioned remarks about Sheila Trask’s work. (These the frowning woman accepted in absolute silence—as if she had heard nothing.) But the young man blundered onward, cleared his throat and declared that he was a “staunch admirer” of Morton Flaxman’s work as well. “He’d be honored to know that,” Sheila Trask said with a flash of malicious gaiety, “if he were alive.”

When Monica left the reception a half-hour later she saw that Sheila Trask had already gone; she must not have stayed more than twenty minutes. Odd, Monica thought, that she had troubled to come at all—she so clearly felt conspicuous, talked-about, ill at ease. And superior to the Glenkill people.

On the flagstone walk outside the residence Monica noticed a limp and torn white flower—a camellia—and had the impulse, for an inexplicable moment, to pick it up.

“You’ll get married again,” friends told her, not knowing how their words stung, and Monica said with as much dignity as she could manage, “Yes—there are different kinds of marriage.”

It had not been for the salvation of her soul—she didn’t any longer believe in either “soul” or “salvation”—but for simple survival that Monica had come to teach at the Glenkill Academy (prestigious, costly, conservative, Founded 1847, as the plaque boasted, by The Society of Friends); and to put her past behind her. Survival was a clear, frank, unpretentious matter, a primitive need which she hoped to cultivate, with hard work and idealism, into something approaching a life.

She, who had always been young, was now a few months from her thirtieth birthday. She was scarred—yes literally and not merely figuratively—by her recent inglorious past: in fact she often found herself stroking her barely visible three-inch wound, her prize, her bitter solace. “Look what you’ve done to me, look what you’ve done,” she had cried in triumph, her first instinct being to accuse, to gloat, to deliver a wound herself which she hoped might be lethal. But the blood had been hers.