Nearly every evening of the week the Starkies threw open their house on campus—“threw open” seemed the precise term—to a promiscuous gathering of students, faculty members, friends and acquaintances in Glenkill, visitors from out of town, professional colleagues. It was no ordeal for Jill Starkie to cook up a spaghetti supper for thirty or forty people—to spend an entire day preparing a buffet for sixty people—to send out invitations to one hundred people inviting them to sherry and cheese parties, open houses following football, soccer, basketball games in season. She loved an impromptu evening of supremely mismatched guests (a visiting theologian, the boys’ swimming coach, a random assortment of students, the English Department secretary and her husband, a plumber) gathered about a roaring fire to drink hot chocolate and to eat, with some good-natured difficulty, roasted marshmallows. Somehow it had come about—how had it come about!—that Monica Jensen, being new to Glenkill, and unmarried, and therefore surely lonely, was often included in this ragtag assemblage of guests, telephoned at the last minute, alternately begged and bullied into accepting. Sometimes Jill behaved as if she were conferring a great honor on Monica by inviting her, sometimes she behaved as if Monica were conferring a great honor on her, by accepting. It was all dizzying—ecstatic—a whirlwind of names, embraces, handshakes, bungled introductions. (Jill frequently called Monica by the wrong name—Myra, Maura, Mona, and so forth—when introducing her to a large group of people. James invariably corrected her, with an edge to his voice, but raising a forefinger as if he had caught out one of his children in a naughty prank. And Jill then blushed, and begged Monica, squeezing her fingers, to forgive her: and it was all amusing, and rather appealing: “I just get so rattled, I muddle everybody’s name, it isn’t just you, Monica,” Jill would say, “why, I know your name as well as I know my own!”)