What then? Who then?' she said. 'Thirty-six; in a motor car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well.

And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?

I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose--so it seems.

She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination.