Increasingly, she came into the life of Tex’s family, joining them for dinner, outings to the theatre or concerts, and on weekend visits to their country house in the Catskills, much as she had with the Daniels. Ann, then in her early teens, remembered Shirley as a rather prim young woman from the office whom her father thought promising and whom he had wanted to help. Arthur Junior, a little older, had a crush on Shirley, whom he thought beautiful, an older woman. Shirley took him to concerts and shared recorded music with him. He once tried to take her hand during a recital and she calmly withdrew hers, “as if she were an older sister.” Shirley never developed a friendship with Wicky, although she wrote in her diary that she tried to like her, as she had, more successfully, Judith Daniel. She remained resistant to the feminist principles that governed Wicky’s personal and professional life, preferring the more conventional hostilities prefigured by adultery. In mid-1955, writing in her diary about a telephone call from the Catskills house, ostensibly about a work matter, she noted that she could hear Wicky and the children in the background, and reflected that she was having, in Donne’s phrase, “correspondence while the foe stood by.” She immediately caught herself: “‘Foe’ is too much of a word; ‘foe’ would be a salve to my conscience. It is the trust I can’t bear, and the friendliness—and my treachery.” In early 1955, after an outing with the Goldschmidts, Shirley reflected that

Wicky seemed—perhaps it is my guilty imagination—a little short. When Tex asked if she wanted to go straight home she said, “unless you and Shirley want to elope.” He said to me “How would you like that?” “That would be wonderful, but do we take Wicky and [their third child] Jeannie along for ballast?” So it goes on and I loathe myself. Shakespeare had a few words to say about this sort of thing in the “Let Me Confess” sonnet:

“I may not evermore acknowledge thee
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honour me.
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.”