Inevitably, but not until the summer of 1956, Wicky learned of the affair. Tex phoned Shirley midweek and then went to Wicky in the Catskills, not returning until the following Sunday. The separation of the adulterous lovers Nettie and Clem in “A Place in the Country” echoes Shirley’s diary entry, at key points almost verbatim:

“Remember…” she began.
“What?”
“About my love.”
“Yes.”
“No one will ever love you so much.”
“No, I know,” he said with slight impatience, as if this were irrelevant. After a moment he added: “Yes, it has been worth it.” His tone was historic, she thought, like a farewell.

Then Nettie wonders, “What has it been worth? What is to happen to me? What am I to suffer? Calamity has a generalizing effect, and as yet she could foresee her suffering only in a monumental way and not in its inexorable, annihilating detail.” For the first days, Shirley was consumed first with “just terror and nausea and anxiety,” and then “the same, but for a sense of relief, in a strange way, that now there would be decision, finality, an end of concealment.” When Tex came to her apartment, at noon on the Sunday, “I knew it was all over.”