Kit relaxed her hands and opened her eyes. ’ This bed. My back is broken,” she moaned.

“What, the accommodations are not to your liking?” Regan asked in disbelief as she stretched and got up. “If you really want to get depressed, think about the food we used to eat here, Slop à la Saint Polycarp’s.” She gathered up her soap, moisturizer, shampoo, cream rinse, loofah and towel in her arms and started for the door. “Another thing I don’t miss is carrying this stuff in a bucket to the shower. There was something so industrial about it. Made me feel as if I was a cleaning lady with a mission and my body was the first room of a dirty house. See you.”

When Regan returned, wrapped in a tprry-cloth robe, she alerted Kit that the coast was clear.

“Nobody else seems to be around. But if you have a Janitor in a Drum in your Samsonite, invite him to shower with you.”

Kit groaned. “Oh, it can’t be as bad as it was.”

“Worse,” Regan laughed. “The drain is so slow that the water backs up fast and your feet get a good slimy soak. We should set up a booth for pedicures and a fungus dip outside the bathroom.”

Regan dressed quickly, pulling on jeans, sneakers and a yellow cotton crew-neck sweater that had been given to her by a former boyfriend only after his maid had shrunk it in the wash.

Approaching the fog-strewn mirror, she plugged in her travelling hair dryer and bent over. Crunching her dark permed hair, she remembered the hours she had spent at this sink drying her waist-length parted-in-the-middle tresses, and silently prayed that none of her former classmates had brought along old pictures.

But it was the same pair of blue eyes that stared back at her when she straightened up and looked in the mirror. The only time they looked different was when she used colored contacts in an attempt to avoid being recognized on a job. And she thought thankfully, her size-eight jeans still fit.

She reached for her cosmetic kit. As she opened it, the smell of White Linen wafted across the room. A purse-size vial of the perfume had spilled all over everything in her pocketbook, including her English money. She laid some still-damp bills on the dresser. The now older-looking face of Queen Elizabeth stared up at her reproachfully.

“Sorry, Your Majesty. But it does smell good.”

The door of the bedroom opened and was slammed shut with a vicious bang. “I slipped on the moss in the shower,” Kit snapped. “And I scraped my butt on the drainpipe. I wonder if Jacoby and Meyers has a London office.”