Then one day, she was tidying my mother’s dressing table, straightening the glass bottles and brushes on its marble top, and I was pulling Mama’s scarves from her dresser drawer. We were busy talking, standing side by side, looking at each other in the looking glass above the table, resembling nothing so much as sisters that morning, our two small faces animated and dancing as we talked—so we did not hear Mama’s hand on the knob, but when she suddenly spoke from behind us, Halcy jumped so, she knocked one of Mama’s perfume bottles off the table. It made a terrific noise, shattering into several tiny pieces at our feet.

“Oh! You clumsy girl!” Mama exclaimed. “Just see what you have done!”

I leapt stoutly to Halcy’s defense. “But you startled us, Mama.”

“A good serving girl, Maisie, must learn to be always on the ready for the entrance of her mistress without event. Fetch a broom, please, Halcy, and clear this away.”

Halcy’s eyes met mine in the mirror as she passed from the room. I did not understand then her face’s shuttered look, but from that day on, she began to call me Miss Thomas, and though I teased her about it, she persisted. This insistence on my formal name hurt me so that gradually I ceased to search her out in the mornings, the divide between us widening to a polite silence.

Papa’s elbow jostled against me as he rose from dinner. All about me there was movement and sound, and I winnowed back up into the clutter of life. Papa stood, his hand upon Mama’s chair as he listened to Miss Grange recounting the terrible storm that had blown down three of the laurels out front, her combs like smooth shells held against the slick water of her hair. Mama sat poised, I could see, to detail the season’s toll on her own garden. I pushed back my chair, suddenly vexed. Around me in the dining room came the same bursts of voice, the hushed movements of the maids as they cleared away the unused silver and the tiny saltcellars before setting out the decanters for the men. Above the mantel, the stilted figures of a couple embraced upon their horses in a forgotten English vale. Everything was just as it always was! I longed for something—anything—so long as it happened. I sprung out from the slow-moving throng with its discussion of winter, stepping ahead through the low-lit front hall and out, out into the night, onto the piazza, whose white columns glowed against the black sparkle of the harbor under stars. Far down the lawn, some of the men strolled, and their white collars flashed in and out of the dark like fireflies. If they turned to regard the fine old house, I would be indistinguishable, a light shadow of white against the white.