A shaft of light came through her window. She looked around quickly, making sure of where she was, focusing upon familiar objects in an effort to assure herself of what was reality and what was the dream. Her cigarettes were on the bedside table. She lit one, shook out the match, reached over to turn on the bedside lamp. There was a clock on the table beside the lamp. She looked at it. It was a few minutes past four. She had gone to sleep a little after midnight, so she had slept just four hours.

She would not be able to sleep any more now. She knew this. Once the dream brought her swiftly awake, sleep was over and done with for the night. She could only get up and bide her time, read a book or take a shower or have a few cups of inky coffee, waiting out the hours until it was time for breakfast and then for work.

There was a hot plate on her dresser, a teakettle centered upon it. She filled the teakettle at the sink and put water on to boil. Then she slipped into a cotton robe and sat down in the room’s one chair and smoked her cigarette all the way down. When the water boiled she made instant coffee and sat in the chair to drink it.

Her name was Rhoda Moore. Not long ago it had been Rhoda Moore Haskell, but the Haskell part had since been carefully cut away through the aseptic surgery of the judicial process. She had thought at the time that this was one of the chief advantages of annulment as opposed to divorce; one automatically returned to one’s maiden name. Legally, one had never been married.

Her lawyer had been against the annulment. “You’re not a Catholic,” he had told her. “You’ve got no basic feeling against divorce. And God knows you’ve got grounds, Rhoda. Why shouldn’t you make him pay?”

“I don’t want his money.”

“Any court in the country would award you a healthy chunk of alimony, a steady income until such time as you remarry. You could go to Reno and call it mental cruelty, or you could stay right here in New York and call it by its rightful name. Adultery. He couldn’t possibly contest it and he couldn’t get out from under.”