Though the balance of power in the relationship would seem to belong to Magda, whose writing at last begins to
achieve significant public notice and
acclaim, it is the extraordinary Emerence and her apparently inscrutable code of moral conduct — she is independent, secretive, primitive, ruthless and gentle at once, tempestuous at one moment and stiffly formal at another, recklessly demanding, contemptuous of religion and yet steely in her own notion of what constitutes true charity — who towers above the relationship with her employer.