She remembered the apartment she had shared with Tom during those years of marriage. It had been a pleasant place in a good neighborhood, expensive to rent and expensively furnished, although the decor had been generally unimaginative. And yet she had never liked that apartment. There were times when she actively loathed it, times when she was on the verge of begging Tom to move to some other place in some other area of the city.

The apartment itself had not been at fault. It was the life she led there which made her loathe the place itself. A reaction to an apartment, she thought, was an intensely personal thing. It was based less on the place itself than on the life one lived there. She had spent a bad two years with Tom; it would have been inconceivable that she could have liked the place where those two years were spent. And she had spent a lonely and wretched batch of months on Grove Street, so that room could only emerge as a symbol of loneliness.

She had spent the finest night of her life at Megan’s apartment on Cornelia Street. How could she help falling in love with the apartment, as with Megan?

Megan was there at five-thirty. They hurried through crowded streets to her rooming house and climbed the stairs and went into her room. Megan looked around the little cubicle and shook her head.

“This isn’t you,” she said.

“It was. For awhile. I was someone else before last night.”

“A bud that hadn’t opened.”

“I’m open now.” She felt giddy, ready to break out into foolish laughter. She danced into the middle of the room and threw her arms wide apart. “I’m a flower,” she said. “See my pretty petals? I’m a flower in full bloom.”

“You’re a little idiot whom I love.”

“So kiss me. Be a bee and steal my precious nectar.”

“I think you’re a little bit crazy.”

“Is that bad?”