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the mirrors had returned an unreliable reply to her own self-scrutiny, some days saying: I am a thing of beauty in this life; I am charged with high destiny. On other days, giving back an unanswering blankness.
    She wondered now if the mirrors had given succouring answers to her mother. Or whether she had daily to live with the absence of answers. Or with fearful answers.
    Her own bedroom here in Geneva was an attempt at sucha haven and an expression of all those womanly essences which her mother had celebrated.
    In some contradictory way, Edith also felt that true physical passion could only express itself amid such feminine order even though that passion came as a gasping, grunting disruption of that bedroom refinement, as if the order had to be there for it to be violated and then restored, awaiting the next disarraying visit.
    Although they slept together, Robert was always a visitor to the bedroom. But then, so had been her father. Neither of them ‘visited’ the bedroom until bedtime.
    Both saw it as a female domain, at least during the daylight hours.
    And Robert did indeed frequently, and mostly to her pleasure, carnally violate her feminine domain with his carnal noises and thrustings.
    She was not like her mother in that she ever locked herself away for days on end. She was generally pleased to rise and to go out into the world.
    As today, she was pleased to rise. She’d woken early and had lain in bed briefly, thinking of the challenges of her day, how the presence of the US should be handled at the Council meeting. The management of history’s stage. Without that management nothing would happen. Or it would happen badly.
    She had a feeling of restive pleasure about the day.
    She looked at Robert asleep in bed in his regimental pyjamas, a garment she detested and which he would not give up, something he retained from his life as an officer in the War and insisted on reordering from London Naval and Military Store against her wishes.
    She had tried to joke him out of wearing them. She had brought fine, black silk pyjamas from Paris as a gift. He would not touch them.
    She had come to abhor not only the dull regimentals, butalso, let it be said, his woollen combination vest and drawers.
    She herself also abhorred women’s pyjamas, silk or not, despite the fashion.
    Some nights she felt her satin, shantung, and voile nightdresses—any of the many which she wore in a considered rotation—were not really friends to his brusque pyjamas. There was a discordance there. And she also chose her nightgowns to glamorise the carnality of the bed. Indeed. Most definitely.
    She had tried to tell herself that his pyjamas were virile, but that hadn’t altered things much and he hardly needed to proclaim his rather active virility. The virility was there too in the rank, sweaty smell of his leather watchband and its cover when it came near to her face. A virility which had been active last night in response to her soignée appearance, or dare she say it, her glamorous appearance. He had energetically violated that as well. Rather pleasurably, even if the subtlety of it had been lost through drink.
    Of course, he never removed the pyjamas during his virile activities.
    Oh no.
    Leaving aside these physical matters—about which she had little complaint—her feelings were that one had to sleep in what made one feel sumptuous. One should leave the exhausting waking world for sleep and then return to it the next morning, well turned out, but most of all, feeling sumptuous.
    Still, her bedroom did not really reach her mother’s standard.
    She did not quite have the time to get it right.
    One day she would.
    He, on the other hand, wanted to preserve the quality of being able to ‘sleep rough’. Whatever the quality of ‘sleeping rough’ was and why it should be pursued in life. ‘Sleeping rough’ was, she would have thought, more an unfortunate scrape than a virtue or