“Excuse me.” It is a real voice that Vinnie now hears, the voice of the passenger in the aisle seat: a bulky, balding man in a tan Western-cut suit and rawhide tie.

“Yes?”

“I just said, mind if I take a look at your newspaper?”

Though Vinnie does mind, she is constrained by convention from saying so. “Not at all.”

“Thanks.”

She acknowledges the man’s grin with the faintest possible nod; then, to protect herself from his conversation and her own thoughts, picks up Vogue.Listlessly she turns its shiny pages, stopping at an article on winter soups and again at one on indoor gardening. The references to marrowbones, parsnips, and partridges, to Christmas roses and ivy, the erudite yet cosily confiding style-so different from the hysterical exhortation of American fashion magazines-make her smile as if recognizing an old friend. The pieces on clothes and beauty, on the other hand, she passes over rapidly. She has now no use for, and has never derived any benefit from, their advice.

For nearly forty years Vinnie has suffered from the peculiar disadvantages of the woman born without physical charms. Even as a child she had a nondescript sort of face, which gave the impression of a small wild rodent: the nose sharp and narrow, the eyes round and rather too close-set, the mouth a nibbling slit. For the first eleven years of her life, however, her looks gave no one any concern. But as she approached puberty, first her suddenly anxious mother and then Vinnie herself attempted to improve upon her naturally meager endowments. Faithfully, they followed the changing recommendations of acquaintances and of the media, but never with any success. The ringlets and ruffles popular in Vinnie’s late childhood did not become her; the austerely cut, square-shouldered clothes of World War II emphasized her adolescent scrawniness; the New Look drowned her in excess yardage, and so on through every subsequent change of fashion.