I think there are moments of complication for Marie: she stands up for Pomona against the popular set in her class quite honourably, even if her manner seems whingey. She's never really allowed to be much good at anything, though: her academic career suggests a rough par with, say, Lawrie--some time in a B form, then promoted, and though she's a weak member of the netball team, mainly there for character-formation reasons, she can't be absolutely appalling. Not appalling like I was appalling at netball.

I wonder if her whole trajectory isn't a sort of vindication in some ways: that a chronic, undiagnosed illness (I know that's not exactly the way it's put, but there are presumably several layers lost in the telling before Nicola hears it) has actually had a deleterious effect on her personality.

I'd like to think that Unity (or her family, at least) has a subscription to Horizon or something, and her references to Beauty and so forth are not sub-Romanticism so much as an attempt at Audenesque brittleness or New Apocalypse. That may be stretching it a bit. But, you know, a chance encounter with 'Musée des Beaux Arts' could have had a very unfortunate issue here.