Sunk in the world, unable to feel anything but the magic of it. Unable to take part.

The field was as wide as the sky, while she was so low that she couldn’t see over horizons of any sort. At a smal clearing where (she later realized) a farmer’s cart or plow might turn around, she came upon the skin of a mouse in the cropped and daisied grass.

The mouse pelt was stil soft and almost warm. Supple, not leathery. As if some snake or owl had caught the creature and eaten it through a seam, blood and bones and little liver and al, but had tossed aside, nearly in one piece, the furry husk.

She had picked it up and dressed her forefinger with it, becoming Mouse. Quickening into Mouse. It had made her feel foreign to herself, and real. Realer. Then the feeling overwhelmed her and with a cry she shuddered the Mouse-shuck off her, away.

It disappeared into the grain. Immediately she loathed herself for cowardice and the loss of a magic thing, and she hunted for it until the memory had hardened into a notion of stupidity and regret.

She kept the memory and suffered the longing but never again was so real a Mouse, not for her whole life.

2.

Please,” said Miss Murth. “He won’t take no for an answer. It’s been an hour and a half.” She laid her palm on her bosom as if, thought Glinda, it were in danger of being noticed. Her fingers fluttered. Murth’s fingers were notched and rickety, like her teeth.

“There is no need to be afraid of men, Miss Murth.”

“It’s an imposition for you to be expected to receive visitors when you are not ‘at home,’ but these are trying times, Lady Glinda. You must hurry. And I can tel by the bars and braids upon his dress uniform that he is a commanding officer.”

“How commanding? Don’t answer that. At least he carries dress uniform into the field.” She worked with a brush and then plunged an ivory comb into her hair, buttressing a heap of it at the nape of her neck.

Ah, hair. “This whole thing is vexing. When I was young and at school, Miss Murth—”

“You’re stil young, Lady Glinda—”

“Compared to some. Don’t interrupt. How times have changed!—that a woman of position can be importuned almost at the doors of her boudoir. And without so much as a letter of introduction.”

“I know. Can I help you in any way…?”

Glinda picked up a smal looking glass with a handle of rather fine design. She peeked at her face, her eyes, her lips—oh, the start of vertical pleats below the join of chin to neck; before long she would look like a concertina. But what could she do? Under the circumstances. A little more powder above the eyebrows, perhaps. At least she was younger than Miss Murth, who was hugging senility. “You may give me your appraisal, Miss Murth.”