It was only when the door opened and she walked boldly and coquettishly in, dressed in vivid crimson, with crimson ostrich feathers bobbing in her curled-up hair, that Collis forgot about the Governor McCormick, and how he was going to raise twelve million dollars in a month. He saw the pearl necklaces and the diamonds and the large emerald resting in the pale creamy cleavage and he felt as if time had stopped, as if the past six years had closed up like a Chinese lantern.

‘Well, Collis?’ said Delphine, dropping him a little curtsey. ‘You seem surprised to see me.’

‘Did you expect me to be anything else?’ he asked her. ‘And here, of all places.’

Delphine looked around. ‘It’s clean, and respectable, and very well spoken of. They say the customers are gentlemen, and that most of them have religion.’

‘I can scarcely believe it’s you.’

Delphine walked slowly around him, smiling to herself. ‘Because that bearded monkey of yours threatened Alice’s father with blackmail? Because he said he would hold me up in public as Senator Carslake’s pet whore? Because you believe that once a young lady’s reputation is sullied, she melts away, like a piece of dirty ice?’

‘You’re as forward as ever,’ said Collis. ‘I’ll certainly give you that.’

‘And you’re just as self-interested as ever, by the look of you. I saw you today at the ceremony. I don’t believe you even thought once of where you were, or what was going on around you. You live inside your own head, Collis Edmonds, and nowhere else.’

‘I believe I’ll change my mind about that glass of champagne,’ Collis said to Mrs Pangborn.

Delphine came over, took Collis’s arm, and looked up into his eyes. She was older, of course, but still just as pretty; and he could remember what he had felt about her that day she had first lifted her face to him in Taylor’s.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, in a hushed, confidential tone, ‘you and your bearded crony did me a considerable favour. Instead of wallowing in misery and humiliation for the rest of my life with Senator Carslake, I decided that if my reputation was so thoroughly soiled that it could be used to blackmail a member of government, then I might as well not trouble with it any more. I borrowed money from the Senator and rented myself a suite on Pennsylvania Avenue, and did very profitably, thank you. Senators, Congressmen, and then soldiers, when the war broke out.’

Mrs Pangborn handed Collis a glass of cold champagne, and he swallowed half of it in one gulp. ‘So,’ said Collis, wiping his mouth, ‘you slid down the slippery slope.’

‘I didn’t slide,’ said Delphine. ‘I was pushed.’

‘And so what are you doing here in Sacramento?’ he asked her.