He awoke just after ten o’clock in the morning in a front second-floor room at the Monument Hotel. His head was pounding, and his mouth tasted, in the nauseatingly memorable words of his grandfather, as if he’d been sucking toads all night. He lay there for almost five minutes, blinking up at the decorative plaster moulding on the ceiling, trying to decide what day it was, and what hour it could be, and why the Lord was punishing him this time.

It was plainly a wet day. He could hear the scattering of rain on the windowpanes, and only a dim submarine light strained through the red-and-cream-striped drapes. It was also plainly quite late, because he could hear the wheels of growlers and carriages outside in the square, and a horse with a distinctive cough. Under the shelter of the hotel’s portico a newsboy yelped in a voice like a Jew’s harp, ‘Tribune! Tribune!’

Something else rapidly became plain, too; and plain in the plainest way. There was a grunt and a sigh beside him, and the grubby green comforter was thrown back by a white freckled arm, revealing on the pillow beside him a tangle of gingery curls. After a further struggle, a girl’s pallid face rose into view, with reddened eyes and smudged rouge, and an expression that reminded him of a stranded codfish he had once had to kill with a brick.

‘Mother in heaven,’ she said, in a strong Irish brogue. ‘Is it morning already?’

He didn’t answer, but pressed the back of his hand to his thumping forehead. There was no question about it. The Lord was punishing him, yet again, for drinking too many stone fences, smoking too many Virginia cheroots, gambling away too much money, and above all for finishing up his evening’s amusement, as he almost always did, with a girl of irredeemably homely looks. He couldn’t think why he did it. No matter how pretty and enchanting they appeared by gaslight, when he was dizzy with bourbon and sweet cider and exhilarated by the loss of scores of dollars of his father’s money, these girls always emerged from the sheets the following morning tousled and plump, with faces as uncompromising as German mineworkers. The Lord was right, right, right, and he was wrong, wrong, wrong. He only wished the Lord wouldn’t keep rubbing it in.

The girl stared at him for a long time. She must have been eighteen or nineteen, and her body was still clothed in that white subcutaneous fat that a man’s fingernails could dig into in moments of sexual duress. Duress was the only word he could think of. Ecstasy seemed out of the question. But she was amiable. She bent forward and kissed his dark tousled hair, and smiled at him with a little twist of her mouth that was almost fetching.