Here’s a passage from The Group that very well may have resonated with our white-nosed Betty. Kay, a college graduate in an unhappy marriage to a creative type named Harold, fantasises about taking the train to Reno: ‘She had loved him at first, she reckoned, but he had tormented her so long with his elusiveness that she did not know, honestly, now whether she even liked him… It sometimes struck her that Harold would not let her be sure of him for fear of losing his attraction: it was a lesson he had learnt in some handbook, the way he had learnt about those multiplication tables. But Kay could have told him that he would have been far more attractive to her if she could have trusted him.’