The young soldier who had sat beside her in the carriage would be old himself now. She could still see the way his thumb jutted from the palm of his hand, feel the way his thigh touched her thigh as he leaned toward her. Perhaps he had a wife and children of his own now. Perhaps he loved them and treated them with kindness, with grace and affection. The world had not shown her that such things were common, but her unhappiness had been made bearable only by the certain knowledge that somewhere there lived people whose lives were not like her own.

Perhaps this Ralph Truitt was one of those other people. Perhaps this life he offered would be some other kind of life. The sun set every day. It could not be that it would set in splendor only once in her lifetime.

Half an hour. She stood up from the dressing table and stepped out of her red silk shoes, lining them up side by side. She began quickly to undo the embroidered jacket of her fancy traveling suit, discarding it behind her on the floor. Then she took off her silk blouse and the heavy red velvet skirt. She undid the laces of her embroidered corset, and shrugged it off. She felt suddenly light, as though she would rise from the floor, a pool of crimson velvet at her feet.

She watched herself in the mirror as she did these things. She saw, for a moment, the reflection of her headless body. It was not unpleasant. She enjoyed her body, the way women sometimes do, and looked at it with a dispassionate eye, as though it were in a shop window, understanding exactly the raw material from which she had produced, a thousand times, certain effects. Every day she took the raw material of her body and pushed and pulled it, decorated it so that it became a heightened version of itself, a version designed to attract attention.