“Why only Quebec?” Ainsley said, breathing smoke out through her nostrils. “Is there some psychological reason?” Ainsley majored in psychology at college.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” said Millie, “I guess people are just more constipated there. Don’t they eat a lot of potatoes?”

“Would potatoes make you that constipated?” asked Emmy, leaning forward across the table. She pushed several straws of hair back from her forehead and a cloud of tiny motes detached themselves from her and settled gently down through the air.

“It can’t be only the potatoes,” Ainsley pronounced. “It must be their collective guilt complex. Or maybe the strain of the language problem; they must be horribly repressed.”

The others looked at her with hostility: I could tell they thought she was showing off. “It’s awfully hot out today,” said Millie, “the office is like a furnace.”

“Anything happening at your office?” I asked Ainsley, to break the tension.

Ainsley ground out her cigarette. “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a bit of excitement,” she said. “Some woman tried to bump off her husband by short-circuiting his electric toothbrush, and one of our boys has to be at the trial as a witness; testify that the thing couldn’t possibly short-circuit under normal circumstances. He wants me to go along as a sort of special assistant, but he’s such a bore. I can tell he’d be rotten in bed.”

I suspected Ainsley of making this story up, but her eyes were at their bluest and roundest. The office virgins squirmed. Ainsley has an offhand way of alluding to the various men in her life that makes them uncomfortable.

Luckily our orders arrived. “That bitch brought me one with raisins again,” Lucy wailed, and began picking them out with her long perfectly shaped iridescent fingernails and piling them at the side of her plate.