She was remembering, these past few weeks, why it had seemed so important to her—so crucial to her well-being, her very life—to be “liked” as an adolescent, to be “well-liked,” indeed to be “very well-liked.” It was all very American, all quite innocent, this early faith in popularity. A ring of smiling admiring faces was a powerful solace for private hurt, and even if one was liked for much that one was not, still the attention was gratifying. Monica recalled how, as a girl of fifteen, secretly unhappy—secretly miserable, in fact—she has been buoyed along by the fact that other girls in her class envied her.

Yet Keith Renwick’s interest in her felt oppressive; a sort of sham. She did not deserve it, she did not want it, yet it was gratifying, and probably harmless. He was a bachelor who had been, as he so fastidiously phrased it, “involved” with a woman for several years, so romance was, for him, as awkward as it was for Monica. (She had told him very little about her marriage and divorce—she was in the habit now of alluding to her past as merely typical, statistical, of no great personal significance.)

Love was a category of being, as was friendship. But the prefatory stage of a relationship was undefined—the prefatory stage of their relationship, at least. If she and Keith were sleeping together, Monica thought, she could say to herself, I have a lover, and it would appear to mean something. I have a lover now. I have a lover again. But they were not sleeping together and they were not in love and so far as Monica knew they were not friends.

“When you come back from Indiana, will you telephone me?” Keith asked; and Monica said, with that false warm enthusiasm that so characterized her these days, “Of course.”

Monica had already mailed Christmas presents home—she was guiltily punctual about such matters as holidays and anniversaries—but at the last minute she drove to Philadelphia to shop for more. A giddy little drunken little shopping spree. She had not done anything quite like this in a decade. Where does the money come from, she asked herself gaily, using her credit card, pulling bills out of her wallet—have I become suddenly wealthy? Her holiday had begun. At last. Perhaps she would regret it later, in January, when the bills came due, but that was later, that would be the “New Year.”