“I know. It’s one of the reasons why I said impossible. It was a game I was playing. Maybe I was trying to think that you could absolve me of the responsibility for what Colin did to himself. What it really amounts to is that I want to be assured that I’m what I think I am.”

“Tell me what you think you are.”

She sat back. “You’re taking me in hand, like a father. Do people like you and your wife pity people like me? I’m serious.”

“You don’t know anything about us, Betty. You wouldn’t ask that if you knew us.”

“You both do so well,” she said.

“That’s the way you want to see it. Let’s go back to what you think you are.”

“I’m thirty years old, working on my second marriage, but I still feel like I’m just starting out. I don’t have any children and I do want them. I feel like I’ve just finished college, that somewhere between last June and this November the whole world went right by me. I’ve wasted years, but I don’t feel them. I wanted to get married and love a man and have a nice home, but I’m still trying to get started on it.”

“All right, suppose I had made a pass at you?”

“I’d have been disappointed with you and ashamed of myself. Men look at me, but they never start anything. I’m grateful for that. Murray and I have been to parties where we’ve seen people operating, breaking up clinches when we came into the kitchen, but I couldn’t handle it. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve never been interested—today excluded. I’d be terribly afraid. I was afraid when I walked into the hotel just now.”

Leland thought of the way MacIver had treated Norma. “Today you were playing a game, you said.”

“Yes.” She was getting upset. “I told you. I know this much: I wouldn’t have told you anything about him if I had really wanted what I had said.”

She did not know the difficulty she was having, trying to convince him about herself. Norma was in many ways far less appealing, and MacIver had treated Norma like a queen. No one did anything without a reason. Leland did not like himself for what he was about to do. Perhaps what was worst about it was that he had to keep up the friendly, understanding presentation; a slip, too much pressure, and she would do what he would expect of himself, push away from the table and walk out.