After her husband had left last evening, she had unpacked and got into bed. When he returned he must have supposed she was already asleep; either that or he pretended to think so. Perhaps he was afraid that if he put the light on, the thing would start up again. But there was nothing more to be said: he could have turned on the light and read all night, or tried to talk it all out with her, and she would not have had another word to say. She would certainly not bring it up again today; no more would he; but what was going to happen when they met again? They couldn’t just go on in stony silence for two whole weeks.

One of the reasons why they had chosen Sconset was because they knew no one here; now, for the first time, she wished they did. If ever they needed the company of friends or someone to pass the time with, it was now. Could there be anything in the Howards? she wondered. From their twenty minutes in the bus together, he seemed amiable enough, but there was something about Mrs. Howard that disconcerted her and discouraged an intimate exchange. She did not especially care for women, to begin with, particularly women her own age, so many of whom were too sophisticated for her, unsimple, or dishonest. Happily married women, those in full possession of their husbands (as Mrs. Howard seemed to be), put Ethel Grandin off her ease, made her self-­conscious, unwilling to compete socially or take part. She was much more comfortable in the company of older women, who thought her an ideal young matron full of sound sense and thus did not really know her at all, or women younger than herself who looked up to her as an experienced wife and mother or talked freely and at length only of themselves and their problems, thus exempting her from social effort. This preference to stay aloof was not snobbishness; it was partly her New England upbringing, partly her lack of confidence in herself as a wife. Had her marriage been completely happy, even blindly so—or even had she been one of those wives who feel superior to or contemptuous of their husbands—she would have been able freely to enter into whatever relationships came up, casual or intimate. As it was, besides the friends of her husband, she had no close friend whatever of her own, and there was small chance of her making any.