While Maeve continued to write stories about Rose and Hubert Derdon, she began to write stories about another couple, Delia and Martin Bagot. These stories are gentler, though the marriage is again unsatisfactory and is in some ways similar. The Bagots have two little girls, born two years apart, and some cats and a dog — a stray that Delia rescued from boys who were tormenting him. Martin hates animals. He also longs to be free of his family, which he regards as an encumbrance; he is by temperament a bachelor and should have remained one. There was a little boy, who died when he was three days old, and Delia has never recovered from the shock of his death. It has made her vague, ineffectual, given to falling asleep in the daytime. What keeps her from slipping over the edge into insanity is the children’s need for her. She was brought up on a beautiful farm in County Wexford and has a way with flowers. There are moments of happiness, when she introduces a new piece of furniture into the house or when, in “Stories of Africa,” a retired bishop of the South African Missions, who was a close friend of Delia’s father, comes to tea and by his saintliness and the sweetness of his nature and his memories of her childhood home restores to Delia a sense of who she is. So far as the Bagots’ marriage is concerned, the bishop’s visit does not alter the situation or provide a way out. There is no way out.

Maeve had a fondness for the rundown neighborhood bordering on Times Square — the visible remains of past grandeur, the crowded colorful untidy fly-by-night air of its inhabitants, the mixture of tourists and transients of every kind all appealed to her imagination, and she sometimes lived there in one small hotel or another. She also lived in the Wellfleet woods and in Amagansett. Fortune had up its sleeve one last great pleasure for her: she formed an intimate friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Murphys were old enough to have been Maeve’s parents, and they had lived in France during the twenties and known everyone of any importance among the expatriate writers and artists. It is said that Gerald served as the model for Dick Diver, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night. While living in France he painted six or eight large cubist paintings and then stopped because after the death of his two young sons he had no more heart for painting. His canvases are now highly valued by museums. He too had a gift for aphorisms, one of which Maeve was given to quoting: “As we grow older we must guard against a feeling of lowered consequence.” He had a Yeats letter, which he promised Maeve would have when he died, but he neglected to put this in writing.