Everyone in Glenkill was fond of the Starkies. The boys, it was said, adored James: he really was a fantastical sort of chaplain for a preparatory school: so thoroughly and zestfully a man. And Jill too was prized for her unflagging warmth, her generosity, her air of slightly dizzy glamor. The ruder Glenkill boys sniggered behind her back, made the usual adolescent jokes, but most of them liked her very much, and basked in her indiscriminate maternal love. She was so unblinkingly and unapologetically a Christian—Monica had never met anyone quite like her. In a supremely casual tone Jill would introduce God or Jesus Christ into the conversation as if the presence of these deities in her home were altogether normal, nothing out of the ordinary. “Can’t you just feel Jesus seated here with us tonight!—it’s just the sort of group He would relate to!” Jill might suddenly exclaim; or, in a graver mood: “I can feel God’s presence here, can’t you?—as soon as James began grace—the ‘spirit moving upon the waters’—” And it suddenly seemed to the Starkies’ guests, glancing nervously at one another, that, perhaps, there was a supernatural being in their midst: the Starkies’ most prized guest.

Jill had been tireless in her pursuit of Monica, since the start of the fall semester. She wanted, she said, to sit down and talk with Monica—Monica might come to lunch at her house—or tea—or they might drive to Philadelphia together, to spend an afternoon at the art museum “or the Rodin Museum—you must not miss that.” But somehow this invitation never came about. And Monica did not encourage it—she was not quite so lonely, she thought, as to yearn for Jill Starkie’s company.