The Chess Player saw it was going to happen.

He saw Djuna slipping off one of the squares and said: "Come here! Hold hands with Jay's warm winey white-trash friends. It is too early in the evening for you to be slipping off."

Djuna gave him a glance of despair, as one does before falling.

She knew it was now going to happen.

This dreaded mood which came, warning her by dimming the lights, muffling the sounds, effacing the faces as in great snowstorms.

She would be inside of the Party as inside a colored ball, being swung by red ribbons, swayed by indigo music. All the objects of the Fair around her—the red wheels, the swift chariots, the dancing animals, the puppet shows, the swinging trapezes, words and faces swinging, red suns bursting, birds singing, ribbons of laughter floating and catching her, teasing hands rustling in her hair, the movements of the dance like all the motions of love: taking, bending, yielding, welding and unwelding, all the pleasures of collisions, every human being opening the cells of his gaiety.

And then wires would be cut, lights grow dim, sounds muffled, colors paled.

At this moment, like the last message received through her inner wireless from the earth, she always remembered this scene: she was sixteen years old. She stood in a dark room brushing her hair. It was a summer night. She was wearing her nightgown. She leaned out of the window to watch a party taking place across the way.

The men and women were dressed in rutilant festive colors she had never seen before, or was she dressing them with the intense light of her own dreaming, for she saw their gaiety, their relation to each other as something unparalleled in splendor. That night she yearned so deeply for this unattainable party, fearing she would never attend it, or else that if she did she would not be dressed in those heightened colors, she would not be so shining, so free. She saw herself attending but invisible, made invisible by timidity.

Now when she had reached this Party, where she had been visible and desired, a new danger threatened her: a mood which came and carried her off like an abductor, back into darkness.

This mood was always provoked by a phrase out of a dream: "This is not the place."

(What place? Was it the first party she wanted and none other, the one painted out of the darkness of her solitude?)

The second phrase would follow: "He is not the one."

Fatal phrase, like a black magic potion which annihilated the present. Instantly she was outside, locked out, thrust out by no one but herself, by a mood which cut her off from fraternity.

Merely by wishing to be elsewhere, where it might be more marvelous, made the near, the palpable seem then like an obstruction, a delay to the more marvelous place awaiting her, the more wonderful personage kept waiting. The present was murdered by this insistent, whispering, interfering cream, this invisible map constantly pointing to unexplored countries, a compass pointing to mirage.