So it might have been out of desperation that I invited Julia down to the ranch where she could meet Bob’s woman, Miss Eugenia Moore, whom I’d talked so much about. They were as different as oil and vinegar but I thought that would merely make them provocative and amusing to each other. That was not one of my champeen ideas. I did not win the nickel with that one. Riley had taken his squaw to a Dallas rodeo and Bryant was off experimenting with whores, so we had the house to ourselves. I hung around in the kitchen while Julia and Eugenia tried to cook an extravagant dinner, but they kept colliding with each other. Miss Johnson bumped Miss Moore’s tin measuring cups of seasonings onto the floor; Miss Moore banged Miss Johnson’s saucepan off a hot plate with a cauldron of water she wanted to boil. They each seemed to have designs on the same tablespoon, the same ladle, the same canister of salt, and what started off with some good-natured titters turned frosty after an hour until Eugenia snapped, “Will you please get out of my way?”

We dined at a polished table that had a purple color to it. The wallpaper insisted that roses bloomed out of roses, and overhead there was a glass chandelier that was adrip with white candle wax. I played the jolly old king with ladies at right and left. They’d smile at me but rarely lifted their heads to see the provocative woman across the way, and when the table talk diminished to a five-minute lull of clinking knives and forks, Eugenia decided to fill it with confessions about her past.

She said, “I was expelled from Holden College in Missouri for moral turpitude. I was discovered flagrante delicto—”

“I don’t know what those words mean,” I said.

“Latin,” she said. “ ‘While the crime is blazing.’ The man was a bachelor geography teacher with a beard large as a neck bib. He took me down to a refectory table, and rucked my skirt up to my shoulders, and traced me with clammy hands. My chief regret about our brief encounter is that he heard footsteps and panicked before I could be defiled.”

Somewhere in the midst of that I tried laughing, “Ho ho ho,” but no one else seemed even tickled, and Julia’s face was on fire.

Miss Moore continued, “I managed my fall from grace soon after that, then tried to restore my reputation by becoming a schoolteacher in Oklahoma, but found it ungratifying. Then I cohabited with an Indian gambler named Jesse White Wings who instructed me in horse thievery. And I learned how to walk out of jail scot-free simply by consenting to a turnkey’s secret wish. Sometimes an abandoned pose was enough. None of it struck me as very distasteful.”

“My! So many skills,” Julia said. “I guess you’ll never lack an occupation.”

“Ho ho ho,” I said.