Having delivered to Amy the message from Mrs. McAllister, I made my way into the drawing-room where the crowd was beginning to thin. Hopestill beckoned to me. “Go up with me, will you, Sonie?” she whispered. I glanced towards her maid-of-honor and she said impatiently, “I’ve arranged that, don’t worry.” Philip’s face was fixed in a smile that revealed his teeth which were so regular and white they looked almost false. The adjective “sanitary” flashed across my mind as I took in his clear, intellectual eyes, his fair hair, his meticulously cared-for person, and in that moment, I preferred his bride upon whose cheek there was a light streak of dirt and who was frankly exhausted and was making no attempts to conceal the fact. I told her that I would meet her in her room and she left when she had said something to Philip who, looking at me as if he had never seen me before, formally shook my hand, not altering his grin in the least. I laughed uneasily and said, “I’ve already congratulated you once, don’t you remember?” and he replied, “How stingy you are! Can’t you congratulate a man twice on the happiest day of his life?” But there was in his voice a note of such staggering unhappiness, so taut an irony that I could make only a feeble rejoinder, told him I must hurry up to Hopestill, that I wished him all the happiness, that I . . .

Hopestill had flung her bouquet down the stairwell, but one flower, limp and ragged at the edges, was caught in the pointed cuff of her wedding dress. She was waiting in her sitting-room for me and she could have been waiting ten years, she had changed so much. The structure of her face was loose, as if the sagging muscles had weakened the mortised bones. There was a starched pallor on her thin lips, a narrow canniness in her eyes, and the skin, in the brief time since I had seen her in the church, had lost that shimmer which had seemed to be touched by the moon rather than the sun, to have been inoculated by the spring rather than the summer, was ashen now, darkening to a bruised blue beneath her eyes. She had had a drink and when I came in, put down her glass. There was a newly opened bottle of whiskey on the table near where she stood.

“By God, he can wait for me!” she cried. “I’ll go down when I’m God damned good and ready.” And she sank into one of the wing-chairs and poured herself another drink.

“It was a very nice wedding,” I said.

“Lock the door, Sonie. I won’t have any of them coming in here! I won’t! I wish I were dead!”