The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half-drawn, and when Jay had barely begun to reconstruct the missing fragment (when she told about the man who was polishing his own telescope glass she did not want to say too much for fear Jay would recognize Philip whom he had known in Vienna and whom they all called playfully in Paris: "Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war"), when Sabina would interpose another face and figure as one does in dreams, and when Jay had laboriously decided she was talking about Philip (with whom he was sure now she had had an affair), it turned out that she was no longer talking about a man polishing a telescope glass with the umbrella hung up in the middle of the room above his work, but about a woman who continued to play the harp at a concert in Mexico City during the revolution when someone had shot at the lights of the concert hall, and she had felt that if she continued to play she would prevent a panic; and as Jay knew this story had been told of Lillian, and that it was not as a harpist but as a pianist that Lillian had continued to play, Sabina became aware that she did not want to remind Jay about Lillian as the memory would be painful to him, for Sabina's seduction of Jay in Paris had been in part responsible for Lillian's desertion of him, and so she quickly reversed her story, and it was Jay who wondered whether he was not hearing right, whether perhaps he had been drinking too much and had imagined she was talking about Lillian, because actually at this very moment she was talking about a young man, an aviator, who had been told not to look into the eyes of the dead.

Jay could not retain any sequence of the people she had loved, hated, escaped from, any more than he could keep track of her very personal appearance as she herself would say: "At that time I was a blond, and I wore my hair very short," or "This was before I was married when I was only nineteen" (and once she had told him she had been married at the age of eighteen). Impossible to know who she had betrayed, forgotten, married, deserted, or clung to. It was like her profession. The first time he had questioned her, she had answered immediately: "I am an actress." But when he pressed her, he could not find in what play she had acted, whether she had been a success or a failure, whether, perhaps, (as he decided later) she had merely wished to be an actress but had never worked persistently enough, seriously enough except in the way she was working now, changing personalities with such rapidity that Jay was reminded of a kaleidoscope.