Louise Glass was forty-eight and looked thirty. She was tall and slim and a redhead, though these days most of the red came out of a bottle. Her skin was pale to the point of translucency, and her sharp-featured face was lovely from some angles and fascinatingly harsh from others. She was, Glass acknowledged to himself, for the umpteenth time, a magnificent woman, and he no longer loved her. It was strange. One day, around the time he had given up being a journalist, all that he had felt for her, all that helpless, half-tormented passion, had dropped to degree zero. It was as if the flesh-and-blood woman had, like an enchanted princess in a fairy tale, been turned to stone in his arms. There she was, as she had always been, a smooth, svelte, burnished beauty, at the mere sight of whom in former days something in him would cry out piteously, in a kind of happy languish, but whose presence now provoked in him only a faint, fading melancholy.