Vivienne wanted to know what she would be allowed to ask after the reading. The page was still unseen, Sunday still ahead, but its arrangements were already acquiring the weight of a difficult visit. She would give her opinion first. After that, might she ask why Vera had liked the passage? On the river walk, the question sounded practical until Vivienne explained the discomfort beneath it: she did not want to dislike a sentence across a table and wonder whether she had insulted half of Vera's life.
Vera could decline to answer. Vivienne offered that plainly, then supplied a less dignified alternative. She would rather hear a refusal than be diverted into an explanation of the author's furniture until she forgot what she had asked. Furniture had, she admitted, been unusually persuasive tonight. There was affection in the complaint, but also a request to be met directly. She wanted room to ask something personal without having to pretend that the personal question had never occurred to her.
Vera granted permission, then adjusted the question itself. Liking a sentence and defending it were different activities. She had enjoyed sentences she considered wrong; she had supported others because somebody at the table dismissed them too easily. That distinction made a simple account of her taste impossible. It also gave Vivienne a warning against searching Vera's face for the approved objection. They would read the page together first. The personal question could follow. If a fictional sideboard appeared in the explanation, Vivienne had permission to interrupt.
Vivienne accepted that particular duty with relish. The sideboard would receive no mercy. Yet she noticed that Vera was already instructing her in how to approach a passage whose page number she did not know. Forgetting everything Vera had said about it was beyond her powers. What she could promise was more limited and more useful: she would identify the words that annoyed her instead of declaring what sort of woman would defend them. Permission to disagree would not, she conceded, make her miraculously fair. She might still judge badly, even while trying to be specific.
Vera did not ask her to forget. Forgetting, she observed, would require more supervision than remembering. She acknowledged having arranged an elaborate entrance for a page that might merely bore her guest. Then she corrected something more substantial in her own account. She had not reread that part of the novel since clearing the chair. She had opened the book, seen her oldest note, and shut it again. Her difficulty defending the passage aloud did not establish that her opinion had changed. She had not yet checked whether the printed words said what she remembered.
The admission made Vivienne want exactly what she had promised to postpone: a look at the margin. She would keep that promise, but asked whether hearing the note tonight would spoil Sunday. She was not demanding that Vera manufacture a better opinion there on the pavement. She wanted to understand what Vera had written that could stop her reading something she had been willing to argue about for years. Her curiosity had narrowed from the whole disputed passage to the interruption Vera had left for herself.
“Ask her why she stayed.” Vera called them four words, underlined, undated, with no useful identification of the woman. She knew she had meant the woman in the novel. What she could not recover was the purpose of the question. Had she wanted the author to explain the character, or been reminding herself that someone should ask the character directly? She remembered arguing that the woman had made a choice. Her own note now made her wonder how satisfied she had really been with that argument.
Six words, Vivienne corrected. She refused to let Vera economise on the interesting part. Asking why someone stayed did not necessarily cancel the choice; Vivienne would want to know the alternatives. Then she caught herself taking a position on a book she had not read. Sunday would give Vera ample opportunity to point that out. Tonight, she asked who had heard the original defence. Vera's sister had, more than once. She had lent Vera the novel before Vera bought her own copy. Vera remembered insisting that staying need not mean the woman had failed to imagine leaving. Her sister had asked which part of the page supported that. Vera could recall the question better than her answer. Before uncovering the margin on Sunday, she wanted to find the words.