Miss Masson

One of the Aldwinkle circle's quieter fixtures, Miss Masson belongs to that rarer class of women whose devotion is patient, orchid-bearing, and impossible to escape cleanly. She laughs at her own small jokes, looks up for applause, and reproaches only with sad brown eyes — a tenderness the narrator experiences as a slow spiritual pumping he lacks the courage to end. Her unbroken, undramatic claim on him shadows the novel's early social comedy with the uncomfortable question of what one owes to being loved.