Her jaw-cut hair they had slashed shorter, and raised upon her head a sort of low comb, like thick fur. All hint of premature gray was gone, and the hair had the sheen of a crow. Her face was a cameo, pale as cream, lit with a tint of blusher, and with two huge black eyes in fans of charcoal and faint silver. Her lips were more full, colored like sweets the world would want to nibble. Her body was soft, taut, scented, closed against all assault and given to light. Her hands were exact as gloves. Even the nails, which for the duration of her grief—how curious—she had not bitten, were formed to ovals and painted a somber terra-cotta two shades darker than her mouth.

Stella went to the cubicle and put on the white silk underclothes, and then the dress and coat she had bought.

They were of the same fine woollen material, and a purple almost black, the tone of sharks, serpents, night-things.

She clad herself. She drew on the boots of black-purple leather.

In the long mirror she saw this other woman, the second Stella, no longer Star.

Dressed now head to toe. Dressed to kill.

The chauffeur-driven car was light gray, the color of the day itself. It glided through the streets and thoroughfares. There were crowds upon the pavements even in the thin rain. Girls with canary hair and boys like Renaissance minstrels, beggars with broken smiles.

They passed Buckingham Palace. Such an ugly building, she thought, as if it had just been built.

The parks were liquid green beneath their empty trees.

The driver of the car did not speak, of course.

Then the byways came again, the squadrons of shops, furniture and clothes, food and drink, chemists for the sick and florists for birth, marriage, love and death.

Stella saw it all as if from high above. The panoply of this city. Its grandeur and its sleaze.

The rain stopped.

They coasted along a road below a wood, the common? And all at once, she saw the house, that peculiar house Nobbi had told her of.

It too was real.

"Go back to the end of the road," Stella said. "Wait there, please."

She thought, Will it matter?

She got out and walked up to the house. Not thinking, He did this. Not thinking now at all.

When she reached the door, the slabs of the house above her with their blind, inky windows, she found a man there in the mud, standing by an unusual machine, a sort of motorbike with a carriage fixed on its back.

"Here I am," said the man.

He looked about fifty, but very slim and hard, and when he smiled his teeth were good and probably not false.

Into white hair, woven in dreadlocks like a black man's, were studded beads like brilliant ants.