“You don’t know how much I need such a friend,” she said. “My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women – my best friends – well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long – people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.”