emotion was held at bay. Only at the dinner table when they were all together did the occasional remark betray the underlying knowledge that something had eluded him, some precious element that seemed to be his was not really. He could not have called it fear-he would have hated the word and rejected it with horror-but staring at him across the snow-white linen and the glittering crystal, Hester thought that was what it was. She had seen it so often before, in totally different guises, when the danger was physical, violent and immediate. At first because the threat was so different she thought only of anger, then as it nagged persistently at the back of her mind, unclassified, suddenly she saw its other face, domestic, personal, emotional pain, and she knew it was a jar of familiarity.
With Menard it was also anger, but a sharp awareness, too, of something he saw as injustice; past now in act, but the residue still affecting him. Had he tidied up too often after Joscelin, his mother's favorite, protecting her from the truth that he was a cheat? Or was it himself he protected, and the family name?
Only with Callandra did she feel relaxed, but it did on one occasion cross her mind to wonder whether Callandra's comfort with herself was the result of many years' happiness or the resolution within her nature of its warring elements, not a gift but an art. It was one evening when they had taken a light supper in Callandra's sitting room instead of dinner in the main wing, and Callandra had made some remark about her husband, now long dead. Hester had always assumed the marriage to have been happy, not from anything she knew of it, or of Callandra Daviot, but from the peace within Callandra.
Now she realized how blindly she had leaped to such a shortsighted conclusion.
Callandra must have seen the idea waken in her eyes. She smiled with a touch of wryness, and a gentle humor in her face.
"You have a great deal of courage, Hester, and a hunger for life which is a far richer blessing than you think now- but, my dear, you are sometimes very naive. There are many kinds of misery, and many kinds of fortitude, and you should not allow your awareness of one to build to the value of another. You have an intense desire, a passion, to make people's lives better. Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are. I have heard you say 'If I were you, I would do this-or that.' T am never 'you'-and my solutions may not be yours."
Hester remembered the wretched policeman who had told her she was domineering, overbearing and several other unpleasant things.
Callandra smiled. "Remember, my dear, you are dealing with the world as it is, not as you believe, maybe rightly, that it ought to be. There will be a great many things you can achieve not by attacking them but with a little patience and a modicum of flattery. Stop to consider what it is you really want, rather than pursuing your anger or your vanity to charge in. So often we leap to passionate judgments-when if we but knew the one thing more, they would be so different."
Hester was tempted to laugh, in spite of having heard very clearly what Callandra had said, and perceiving the truth of it.
"I know," Callandra agreed quickly. "I preach much better than I practice. But believe me, when I want something enough, I have the patience to bide my time and think how I can bring it about.''
"I'll try," Hester promised, and she did mean it. "That miserable policeman will not be right-I shall not allow him to be right.''
"I beg your pardon?"
"I met him when I was out walking," Hester explained. "He said I was overbearing and opinionated, or something like that."
Callandra's eyebrows shot up and she did not even attempt to keep a straight face.
"Did he really? What temerity! And what perception, on such a short acquaintance. And what did you think of him, may I ask?"
"An incompetent and insufferable nincompoop!"
"Which of course you told him?"
Hester glared back at her. "Certainly!"
"Quite so. I think he had more of the right of it than you did. I don't think he is incompetent. He has been given an extremely difficult task. There were a great many people who might have hated Joscelin, and it will be exceedingly difficult