“Did you make all this stuff?” He sat down on the bed to take his shoes off, slightly damaging a hat like a Shriner mosque. “You have some expensive hobbies, love.”

Julie said, “It isn’t as extravagant as it looks. Most of the material is synthetic—I use terrycloth a lot and I’ve made things out of ordinary blanketing, outing flannel. There’s velvet, some silk and taffeta, some upholstery brocade. I use what I’ve got, unless people want to pay extra for something special. Rats, I don’t think I like those tights on you. Try the brown houppelande.”

“The brown what?” Julie indicated a high-necked gown, the full sleeves lined in black and the skirts held together in front by an enameled girdle. Dutifully struggling into the gown, he asked, “What people? Whom do you make these things for?”

“All will be revealed,” she told him in a hoarse gypsy whisper. She considered him abstractly as a design of folds and flows, shaking her head slowly. “It would do, but I don’t know. I hate to waste your legs. No.”

Eventually she decided on plain hose and a dark blue doublet embroidered with green and gold diamonds and fleurs-de-lis. The waist was tapered sharply, and the sleeves were split all the way up the inside of the arm. She gave him a pair of low, pointed shoes and a soft velvet cap and said happily, “You’re fun to dress. I could play with you all evening. Go look at yourself.”

Farrell stood before the mirror for a long time, not at all out of vanity, but only to make the acquaintance of the slender, burning stranger in the glass. Under the high cap, his face was younger than Farrell’s and differently made; the nose was longer, the eyesockets notably more arched, the forehead rounder, the wide mouth grown curiously shadowed and secretive, and the whole off-center cast of the face at once as unnervingly tranquil and as deeply, casually ready for violence as that of a knight on a tomb rubbing or an angel on a stained-glass window.