She remembered filing out of the workshop in a daze. Condemned by a jury of her peers. Jamie and Marcella asked her to come for a drink as if nothing had happened but she couldn’t face it. She felt as she had the first day. Innocent and enormously foolish. She didn’t belong here; she never had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t the brains; it was that her ambition wasn’t high-brow enough. Years of dulling necessary work had knocked that out of her. Life and single mothering and bad TV had thinned her emotions. The bad poetry of her youth at least had had heart.
