Clover had no similar relief: nothing was expected of her. She ran the salon, she socialized skillfully, she exercised a wit that as time passed yielded less pleasure, less energy, less meaning. In short: she had no work. No work meant inner drift. The men in her circle were each compelled by inner necessity to convert disability to virtue -- especially Henry whose genius it was to make of his own self-doubt an instrument of historic interpretation -- but Clover remained an intelligent woman who feared being thought a blue, condemned to back off from the only kind of struggle that would have sufficiently freed her from the same conviction of inner worthlessness that dogged the men around her. With no useful way to vent themselves, her anxieties went underground where they increasingly transformed into postures of spiritual inertness, hesitating thought, demoralized will. In time she became that which women were accused of being by nature.