CHAPTER III
FORTIETH BIRTHDAY
Kate woke up one morning, aged forty. She did not hide the fact from herself, but she kept it dark from the others.
It was a blow, really. To be forty! One had to cross a dividing line. On this side there was youth and spontaneity and ‘happiness.’ On the other side something different: reserve, responsibility, a certain standing back from ‘fun.’
She was a widow, and a lonely woman now. Having married young, her two children were grown up. The boy was twenty-one, and her daughter nineteen. They stayed chiefly with their father, from whom she had been divorced ten years before, in order to marry James Joachim Leslie. Now Leslie was dead, and all that half of life was over.
She climbed up to the flat roofs of the hotel. It was a brilliant morning, and for on
