I had not seen her very often as she grew up because she was sent away to school. I remember that she always seemed to be at home during the holidays, for I found it strange. She never brought a friend home with her and whenever I came across her she was on her own. Most girls of her age spent at least part of their holidays in each other’s houses, went around in packs or in pairs and lounged a lot—like wild cats—before marriage and responsibility domesticated them and dulled their shining fur, silenced their wails. Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence. As their elders require that they should conform to society’s demands, to the hypocrisy—if we are to be honest—that makes life possible, the young often respond with a curious superiority. It is unlikely that they have yet done anything truly dreadful and they suspect that their elders probably have. To be told how to behave by a person steeped in moral turpitude is annoying to everyone, but more particularly to the young. And then the old grow exasperated by the stupidity of the young: by their failure to realize that moral decline is a matter only of time, and that as circumstances alter they too will be forced to cut corners and compromise their early—and unfortunately vague—ideals. Of course only the good die young. With a few rare exceptions only the young are good. Margaret sometimes struck me as too good to be true. She had not that quality of fresh and honest surprise and indignation that I have been speaking of. Rather she had a copybook conformity which only a fool could have taken for the real thing. The real virtue of youth lies in that impulsive generosity and Margaret was as contained and closed and mute as her mother’s meat safe. On the face of it she was the perfect girl: obedient, disciplined, quiet, sober and undemanding, and yet she was wholly unnatural. Perhaps Syl was deceived by her appearance, by the way she behaved like a much older person, into imagining that she was unusually mature for her age. No, he wasn’t. He found her similar to me, and also might have thought that behind her reserve lay those much-vaunted banked fires beloved of novelists. I’d never believed in them myself. Ice and fire do not coexist and all the romantic longing in the world will not make it so.