Paris by Night

She surveys the room where she has slept all the eighteen years of her life: the old brass bed, the pink armchair in the corner where she has read so many books, the Queen Anne tallboy where she has kept her sweaters and her secrets-the diary where she recorded what she did and the one where she wrote down her fantasies, which her mother discovered and believed to be real. Questioned about it, Sheila told her mother it was all made up. 'Tm glad to hear it! The thought of your doing something of that kind!” her mother said, referring, Sheila presumes, to the nude swims in the dark, dangerous water of the Indian Ocean with a mysterious stranger.