So her cut left thumb is monstrous; not to worry. The whole hand’s a wash. There’s a gold band jangling at her knuckle, exposing the pallid cleft worn into her finger after nearly seven years, as cows wear a path around a hill—a circlet of skin white as a grub. She’s never taken her ring off, and now she thinks she just might. It was a fake, anyway, a placeholder for the nice ring he was going to buy her when they had money enough—it was real gold, but cheap, and never intended to last. Five years, seven years tops. A cheap ring for a hasty wedding. That’s how he’s gotten loose, the fraud, on a technicality. Nothing, nothing is sacred. The Bloomsday, Bloomsbury bloom is off: it was just a rainy June Saturday in a wormwood London parish.

Maybe, She is thinking with her sleek new head, she will take the ring off. For she is going back to London, and she is going to see Ted. She gathers her purse and her packages, keeping her injured thumb high and clear, and teeters over the narrow cobblestones toward Court Green’s back hall. She listens at the thick oak door, her pocketbook swinging at her elbow: Sue has the children in the kitchen. They’re singing Mother Goose rhymes. Sylvia steps back. She wants a few minutes more, before the children hear her, to settle in with her booty and decide what she’ll wear on the train tomorrow. She turns toward the side of the house, boxes stacked on her forearms, and begins to walk quietly around to the front door, over the sloping lawn besieged with stinging nettles.

Thank god for birthday checks. Here’s to her mother, and to her long-time benefactress, the Boston novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, always Mrs. Prouty; here’s to the first real shopping spree since she left Smith seven years ago. She’s got a smart camel’s hair suit, jacket and skirt, with a matching sweater. Two more skirts, both fashionably cropped to the knee, one cut slim of cerise wool, another in a tweed of deep blue and black. A black cashmere sweater, good with either the skirts or the suit. A cardigan green as a duck’s head. New pewter jewelry, earrings and a chunky bracelet. Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been? All soon to be put to good use. Sylvia has made a decision: she wants to move to London for the winter. She’s so sure of this, so determined it’s what she must do, she has braced for resistance and pressed the idea upon Ted—and to her astonishment, he approves. He’s even offered to meet her at the station tomorrow, to have a look at her new work, even to help her look for a flat.