Monica thought Sheila unnaturally beautiful, more beautiful, indeed, than she’d ever seen her before. She wore a long dress of crimson crushed velvet in a wrap-over style that casually, but very casually, revealed a good deal of the luminous-pale skin of her chest; gold chains of varying degrees of weight and splendor were looped about her neck; gold earrings—not unlike Monica’s silver Moroccan earrings—fell gracefully, in coils, to brush against her shoulders. Painting a face, Sheila once said, a face overlaid upon one’s own, was a cheerful sort of challenge if one didn’t take it seriously; she quite enjoyed the task, bringing to it her artist’s penchant for stylish legerdemain, making of distinctly faded and flawed skin a ceramic-smooth surface—coloring in the lips brightly, slyly—applying with a tiny brush several shades of eye shadow (mauve, beige, dark brown)—shaping the brows so that they were not quite so savage but might be seen as exotic. Such beauty is sheer trumpery, Sheila said, therefore the sport of it, that, for a few giddy hours at least, one is what one seems: one “is” beautiful if one “seems” beautiful. And it was all very innocent, wasn’t it?

Though thin, nearly gaunt, Sheila managed to suggest a lanky sort of luxuriance, with her springy black hair, her crushed velvet dress, the earrings, the gold chains, the rings on her fingers that flashed and glittered. (She had scrubbed her hands clean with turpentine that very morning and had done, to Monica’s surprise, a creditable job.) She managed to suggest too a childlike gaiety, a virginal chasteness, even as she and Hen kept up their flirtatious banter, and, from time to time, swaying on her feet in imitation of drunkenness (for of course she was drunk) Sheila slipped an arm around his neck to steady herself.

When Sheila’s gaze locked with hers Monica believed she could sense her friend’s slight embarrassment—for this was all such a sham, wasn’t it—a masquerade, a sustained deception—but in the next instant Sheila smiled, showing her teeth, and called out aggressively so that all her guests heard, “Aren’t you lovely tonight, Monica—!”

“Don’t tell me, please, that you’re an artist too, like Sheila,” the man seated beside Monica said, staring at her. “You could be an artist’s model.”

“Really?” said Monica, greatly amused. “What sort of artist?”

She was looking uncommonly good, she knew; and it did not hurt her prospects that she was the youngest woman seated at Sheila Trask’s dining room table.

The man—his name was Win—“Winthrop”—smiled at her as if she’d said something witty, which perhaps she had.