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!”

I locked the door as she ordered me and reluctantly returned. She directed me to sit down opposite her and she said, “I really mean it: I wish I were dead. Now if I were you, I wouldn’t wish that, but strictly sotto voce, strictly entre nous I wouldn’t predict what you’ll be feeling if you go on living with Aunt Lucy for another two years.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s not quite the same thing. It’s not the same at all, Hope.”

“Listen to me, you child, you baby, you innocent little girl: the time will come when you see through that woman and know her for the bitch she is. It’s that she’s got to have power. All of us do here: we are obsessed by it. Philip is. I am. As soon as Aunt Lucy saw she couldn’t control me—up to a point she could because she was my guardian and doled out my money nickel by nickel—she got a cat! That’s the vile perverted thing she did! And kept the cat locked up in a storeroom deodorized by pine-scent! Oh, she fed Mercy well: the best tinned salmon, the finest kidneys, the richest milk, and every now and again the ‘Persian fat lady,’ as she was revoltingly referred to, was allowed to come down and purr for Aunt Sarah and Uncle Arthur and Admiral Nephews. Until, mind you, she had a chance to perpetuate her species and have four hybrid kittens and then she was permanently incarcerated.”