So Late in the Day: Stories of Men and Women

by Claire Keegan

‘She said things may now be changing, but that a good half of men your age just want us to shut up and give you what you want, that you’re spoiled and turn contemptible when things don’t go your way.’

That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.

Something about this story now put the woman in mind of how she had been at another point in her life, when she was falling out of love with a separated man who had said he wanted her to live with him, a man who often said the opposite of what he felt, as though the saying of it would make it true, or hide the fact that it was not.