“She was just gorgeous, or so it seemed to me, and she wasn’t just endowed by nature with an admirable face and large eyes, she had a pertness to her, a freshness, a quick refinement. Surely there was a corset shaping her little waist, and the ruffles of her blouse were stiffly ironed and flawless. Her taffeta skirt was a rich chocolate brown color that glinted in the sunlight, and she had tiny feet in fancy lace-up boots.

“ ‘I just know you’ve been worried,’ she answered. ‘I know lots of things. You might say I know everything that goes on. Things don’t really go in a straight line the way living people think. Everything is always happening all the time.’ She reached over and clasped my right hand with both of hers, and I felt the shock again, electric, dangerous, and delicious chills ran all over me, and I bent forward and I went to kiss her lips.

“Teasingly, she drew back just a little, and then, with her breast pressed against my arm, she said, ‘But let’s go inside. I want you to light the lamps.’

“That made perfect sense. I hated the long shadows of the afternoon. Light the lamps. Light the world.

“ ‘I hate the shadows too,’ she said.

“We rose together, though I was faintly dizzy and I didn’t want her to know it. We went inside the cool and silence of the house. I could just barely hear the sound of running water in the kitchen. Four p.m. Dinner not for another two hours, and how curious the house looked! What a curious fragrance it had—of leather and crushed flowers, of moth balls and wax.

“The living room was full of different couches and chairs with frames that were somber and black and shiny, real Victorian furniture, I thought, and there stood another antique piano, far older than the one that had been there before. It was a square grand. The draperies were a heavy midnight blue velvet, and the lace panels were full of gracefully drawn peacocks. The windows were open. How pretty, the breeze against the lace peacocks. How perfect, I thought.

“A thrilling ecstasy took hold of me, a certainty of the pure beauty of what I saw and the irrelevance of all else.

“When I looked over at the dining room I realized that it too was altered, that the draperies were a peach silk with gold fringe on them, and that the table was oval, with a vase of flowers in the center. Fresh roses, natural garden roses on short stems, petals lying on the waxed table. Not cold magnificent florist roses. Just roses that could make your hands bleed. Drops of water on the round vase.