It is four o’clock. I pause at the entrance to the drawing room and pull my skirt straight. Father glowers as I enter. I notice a stain of paint on my hand and tuck it behind my back. I seat myself on the couch next to Mother. A knock on the door announces the first guest. We begin our familiar routine.

We are mechanical figures, you and I, controlled by an invisible puppeteer. We listen and observe, saying only enough to keep the ball of conversation lopping backward and forward across the table. We are its reluctant guardians, required to keep it always in motion, suppressing any desires we might have to send it spinning out of orbit or to allow it to settle for a moment at rest. We must pat it to the shy young woman in the corner, judging our stroke so that it will land gently enough to encourage her to raise her racket and participate in the game. We must sequester it away from the monopoly of our aunts batting it conspiratorially between them, somehow prevent the young men sitting with Father from stealing it to show off their learning.

You are better at it than I am. You become a mistress of disguise. I am astonished, as I listen to you, at the way you weave your barbs into a fabric of such loveliness that your interlocutor is left wondering whether it is a compliment or an insult you intend. I lack your subtlety and skill.

You were to record, later, the impact that tea-table training had on your writing, so that you never felt able to give yourself free rein. You had words at your disposal nevertheless, and you found a way to survive. For me it was different. I had to fish in precisely that area of myself where I felt most ill at ease. I was always running out of things to say, straying into territories I knew were forbidden and where I exposed myself to censure, or coming aground on the banks of an unstoppable pause. Increasingly, I copied Mother, adopting her silent attentiveness as my costume for those apprenticeship afternoons.

We learned even as we despised. Young, earnest, eager to please, we were like fledgling birds watching for the clues that would enable us to fly. We caught occasional glimpses of the dancing kite tails of our lives in the space ahead of us, and our hearts quickened in response. We longed to take the leap that would allow us to chase after them, yet we clung to the safety of our nest.