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seemed to beat together, and as she felt the deep tide of peace rising within her Monica knew that her strength, now, was greater than Hester’s, and her understanding greater.

‘You didn’t exist for me, Monica; you simply didn’t exist,’ said Hester. ‘If I thought of you at all, I thought of you as the Victorian Aunt Sally my generation has been brought up to shy coconuts at. The only thing that defined you clearly for me was that you were the sort of woman who would think it wicked to have a lover. Not that Clive said you would think it wicked. He only said that you’d be hurt. That was why he wouldn’t tell you. But it was more than that. It was because it would have hurt him, too, most horribly, to tell his mother that his wife had had a lover. I didn’t mind, one way or the other; about your being told. But I didn’t think it your business. And I didn’t see, or suspect, that he was hurt all the time, though he pretended not to be. I wasn’t in the least afraid at first, Monica, of you or your standards, because I didn’t imagine that Clive was. It was only by degrees that I began to see that I was outside, and that you were inside, with him, always.’

As they were now, Hester meant, perhaps, though she did not glance at them. She sat there, with