Her hair set, she moved to one of the beds and half leaned, half lay alongside the footboard. She fixed the older woman with an unseeing gaze and Ethel Grandin grew self-­conscious. She knew she was in for a session of self-­revelation and she felt herself both ill equipped and unwilling to take part in it. Why did women always have to do these things, what gave them the right always to be airing their feelings? Had they no pride—had they no respect for their husbands? Love was a thing intimate and exclusive, one of those fundamentals which one did not discuss because, universal though it may be, it was personal even more. Her ten years of marriage had little to do with Billie or indeed with anyone else. What was true of herself could not be true for another, or have any meaning or interest for an outsider. Thus she had believed; not because her experience was special but because it was personal, private, and her own. “Mine is different,” she had always thought—forgetting that in this world nobody’s experience is unique.

This reticence sprang less from her natural disinclination to talk about herself than from loyalty to her husband; she could not have discussed the smallest aspect of their relationship if her life depended on it. Had her marriage been ideally happy or, on the other hand, miserably barren and loveless, she would never have mentioned it to another living soul. It was simply not in her to communicate her feelings about herself, still less about her husband. To have done so would have been a violation of love: it would have cheapened him, made him common property, removed him to the outer world of other men where (as her husband) he did not belong.

“Funny about Cliff,” Billie said dreamily, but with a kind of impatience, too. “It almost doesn’t seem to matter whether he’s around or not. I loved him just as much when he was out in the Pacific as I do now that we’re married, and maybe I even got just as much out of it. This week he’s been different than I’ve ever known him. When he comes to bed, I almost wonder whether it’s him at all, or even me. Still I guess it’s Cliff all right. I just sort of wait till it’s over and he can come back to me. The last two nights I kept thinking, oh dear, if only he’d go away so I could dream about him like I used to. But of course I don’t want him to go away either. I love to have him around so I can just look at him. Don’t you think he’s wonderful looking? But when he’s close to me, like when he makes love, I can’t see him . . .”