But I was there, taking the Professor’s hand and closing my borrowed stole around me with the other as I stepped out of the car. That was borrowed as well, the Professor said. A sleek black 1921 center door sedan that the Gray-Dort automobile company hoped he’d be tempted into purchasing. Regardless, lending it to us for an event as distinguished as the Mount Royal Hotel’s debut would no doubt be a kind of advertisement for them, reinforcing Gray-Dort over Ford as “Canada’s Choice.” I felt at the height of celebrity, and even when my feet found the curb I wasn’t certain I was on the ground.

“There are a lot of people anxious to meet you, Dolores,” the Professor said as we stepped inside.

“She’s here to enjoy herself, dear.”

“And she will, darling. I promise.” The Professor gently nudged me on when the glittering chandelier just inside the entrance bewitched me, stopping me in my tracks. Its light splashed across the ceiling and cascaded into the room beyond. “There’s more, ma petite,” he said with a smile, “there’s more.”

The “more” he described seemed to be people; they swam about the hotel in graceful parties, gloved fingertips touching jacket arms, bare necks bowing like swans’. They were all important, I could tell by their almost competitively straight posture and by the way their gentle laughter and delicate perfume lingered in the air. If they were expecting me, it was as the Professor’s pride and joy, the jewel in his already acclaimed practice.

Memory extraction had brought the Professor international commendation in his discipline, but his case study of the extract who defied convention brought him social notoriety. In the intervening years since that night, Sources would occasionally appear at functions I attended with the Professor, parading their perfectly ordinary Mems around at parties, hoping to replicate that notoriety and the bygone celebrity afforded the original Dolores Extract No. 1.