She had slipped from her childhood torments into the polite and considerate world of adults. She had succeeded in not thinking about what people said about her when she wasn’t there. Besides, she had been able to elevate herself in other ways. She could speak on literature, politics, art, and foreign countries as well as any man in their circle. She had lived in France for two years, painting a bit and drawing. She had learned to converse with all kinds of people and to hold her own in any gathering. But did any of this really interest her, apart from as a vehicle to draw people’s attention away from other women’s well-formed legs and normal gait?

She was done with the potatoes, and as she stood with one hand on the faucet and the other swirling around in the pot, it was as if suddenly she didn’t have the strength to rinse the potatoes and put them on the stove. She sat down on a kitchen chair and dried her hands on her apron. There she remained completely still, staring straight ahead, as if she were a machine that could continue working for a minute after the power was shut off, but would then stop with a shudder and go dead, indifferent to the shreds of incomplete work wound between its ingenious gears and cylinders.

Right, everyone knows. With her most intimate girlfriends she could talk about it once in a while – and then at home of course, where it gradually became an inevitability similar to her mother’s arthritis and her father’s perpetual headaches.

But to him she had never mentioned it. Sometimes – especially at the outset of their relationship – she felt that he was just about to mention it, maybe to help her, but then she got up and gave him a kiss or asked about something and turned his thoughts in another direction. Perhaps he had gradually begun to understand that he must never bring it up, because it would ruin her illusion that, at least to one person, she was complete, the most beautiful and most loved woman in the world. In this way she had succeeded in separating this curse from their marriage, from her husband’s eyes and consciousness, and thereby from her own thoughts – at least in the time she spent here in the kitchen and in the other rooms – a newly married and happy young couple’s first home. She had placed her life’s great despair outside the door, and only when she left home did the sorrowful black cape wind back around her. Because out in the world nothing had changed – not the impersonal, telling glances from strangers, nor the brazen staring of children.