Huddled inert beneath the quilt with King Lear, her knees flexed, on the messy bed. Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. Picking up where they left off, reading aloud together a few days ago over tea—ceremonial afternoon tea, the one reliable meter ticking over these unstructured days. Also Freud, also the Story of a Soul—the autobiography of St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, hauled up to welcoming heaven in a shower of roses—and the recent works of their Boston and Cambridge neighbors, whom she could practically trip over any day on the brick-paved streets of this literary enclave: Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Adrienne Rich …

It is a test; a gauge of improvement after three weekly sessions with Dr. Beuscher, her old psychiatrist, who’s taken her on as a private patient. In Boston since September, both she and Ted intentionally jobless, prudently monitoring savings from prizes and teaching that should hold them for a year with just enough remaining for ship fare back to England, timely escape from the bone-snap of this American rack. Living, meanwhile, in frugal refinement, reading and studying and thinking and writing, shopping at the cheap, fly-scrimmed open stalls of Haymarket; living like serious writers. That, anyway, is The Plan.