And she had not, whereas if there is anything that I had done since I had seen her it was to change. I knew why she had said what she had said: it was to disarm me to try to prevent me from displaying any alarming symptoms of mutation, and she had succeeded, for I had remembered about the kissing. I had remembered, as she spoke, that the Scotts never used to touch one another or anyone. As she followed me through the dingy garage to the foot of the narrow, carpetless, exposed staircase, I filled slowly with panic and unease: it was so like me to live upstairs when other people live downstairs, and she had never approved in me the vein of perversity that had started to show itself even in school. We had been great friends, and no mistake, and yet everything in me that was to flourish had belonged to the side of me from which she had always edged away. She had always distrusted, for instance, my university background. I used at times to regale my school friends with what I then considered to be rich anecdotes about young men I had met who lived on bread for a whole month, or wore wooden clogs, or could not get out of bed in the mornings because they had been reading Berkeley and were no longer sure that the floor was there. I could usually get a good audience, and I was myself enthusiastic about these oddities. It used to hurt me that Mary would never take my part and theirs. She would disapprove, though mildly: she would say that in her opinion really interesting people did not behave oddly, that oddness was simply a sign of insecurity, that true intelligence could satisfy itself perfectly well by orthodox means. I knew all too well what she meant. And now I felt such a resurgence of those old anxieties, for her opinion did seem to carry weight; and I felt that everything about me, the style of my hair, the furnishings of my house, the nature of my husband’s profession, the nature of my own intermittent profession, even, as I have said, the fact that my drawing room was on top of a garage laid me wide open to censure.