IT WAS the end of life for her. I am dead, she thought. I will continue to walk through life but will be dead, sober and unscathed, because nothing will ever touch me again. I will be a spinster with a bun, wearing the same coat with a loose hem … No one would reach her as Walter Vail had done. No one would twist the button of her glove, speaking to her in the way he had, checking the expression of her face as if he knew what lay behind it. What went on in his head Lilian hadn’t a clue, though she was sure it consisted of the most compelling stuff.

Some days she longed for company, others she wanted only to be left alone. She would have gone away, only she realized that wherever she went, her self would have to come with her.

The few days replayed themselves to her, unraveling like foil, flashing out bits. There was a dark bar shadowing his eyes, she felt his arm pressed across her middle, stopping her breath. She thought of questions she would have liked to ask him — they’d not occurred to her at the time — where had her mind been? Then the details grew menacing: his face was turned away, he was dining with Nita Russell, their heads close together. She watched her own careful feeling evaporate. What had been sweet to her apparently left no trace in him whatsoever.

She did not curse him, or tear up his letter, or speak badly of him to others. She’d seen other girls display a sort of amnesia about the boys they’d liked. Marian Lockwood and Chip Cunningham had been together for years and after she broke it off, Marian spoke so disparagingly of Chip, one wondered what she had liked about him in the first place. Madelaine Fenwick mentioned her old beau and shivered as if a goose were walking over her grave, and when Lilian asked Dolly Cushing what had become of the fellow from New Haven who used to travel back and forth on the express train to see her, she shrugged as if to say why would she know?

Of course the war had changed these things also. A lot of boys had not come back, and it made the ones who did different from everyone and the world around them different too. The life Lilian had known up till then was a fabric of generations: once, she had felt its monotonous pattern, but now she longed for the normalcy of it. She would not soon forget the terrible afternoons in the living rooms of the houses where a boy had not come home — the American flag on the iron balconies, the maids with red eyes.