He sat up again, rubbing his arms. He had lost his cheroot among the bedclothes, and he spent a minute or two trying to find it. When he looked up again, he was surprised to see that Kathleen Mary was weeping.

He got up from the bed, went to the window, and put his arm around her. She sniffed, and attempted to smile bravely through her tears. For a moment or two, they stood without speaking, while she continued to sniff and he looked at her with those concerned eyes of his, and outside the clouds must have begun to clear, because the window was suddenly suffused with bright mother-of-pearl light, and the raindrops shivered and sparkled on the glass.

‘I didn’t intend to hurt your feelings,’ he said huskily. ‘I’ve gotten too hard-shelled of late, I guess, what with my family nagging so much. Why don’t you get yourself dressed, and I’ll buy you some breakfast. We can have chicken capitolade down at Sweeney’s.’

She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. ‘You don’t have to feel obliged.’

Collis shrugged, and took down his pants from where they had been hanging like a Christmas stocking from the end of the bed. As he pulled them on, he said, ‘I do feel obliged, as a matter of fact. I think you’re most likely right, and it’s time that I started paying more attention to the feelings of my fellow men and women. Apart from that, it’s such damned hard work being as much of a sour-faced bastard as my father, and as much of a tyrant as my mother, and as much of an unctuous hypocrite as my sister Maude, all rolled up into one. I think it’s probably easier, and less of a strain on the liver, to be pleasant.’

He reached into his pocket and took out a handful of silver dollars.

Kathleen Mary coloured and looked back at him with uncertainty. ‘That’s all right,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s two dollars the night, all night, and I don’t ask for any more.’

Collis picked out three dollars and handed them to her. ‘There’s an extra dollar by way of recompense for rudeness.’

She dropped the money into her cheap black leather reticule. Then she took her corsets from the arm of the chair, wrapped them around herself, and proceeded to lace them up, inch by inch, with increasing tightness, until her small-breasted chest was puffed out like a pigeon’s, and her hips and thighs swelled out below.

‘That’s the worst of it over,’ she said breathlessly.