Mrs. Kathleen Drover

The story centers on the perceptions and actions of Mrs. Kathleen Drover. When she finds a letter addressed to her in her abandoned London home, she thinks back to her former nameless soldier-lover during World War I. She is keenly aware of her surroundings: the atmosphere, weather, and particularly, a sense of strangeness. The letter lying on the table compels her to imagine the various possibilities for how the letter got there in the first place.

Because of the overwhelming sense of the strangeness of her situation, Mrs. Drover rushes upstairs to check herself in the mirror: her "most normal expression was one of controlled worry, but of assent . . . [she] had . . . an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but . . . she could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm." To her family Mrs. Drover is a picture of stability and...