So be it, and grandly too. Yearners more than deserved their time. Time, after Darwin, was the only munificence left to anyone. With no heaven to behave for, if a girl wanted to strut through chambers past panoramas of idealized national loft, it was her birthright. Mabel remembered her smooth days on the Hill—how senators perused her, how staffers maneuvered her, how women hated and talked, and a few desired. It had all been a shock, and now it was sentiment and nostalgia of old tulle veils.

Don, on the Hill—it made her fond, almost, toward him. His memories, she said to herself with a bullhorn. His memories! Could he go up to the Hill to relive them? That, that was unseemly. If he could have managed ill-advised, caution-exhausted love with a woman in no way at all resembling her—that she could respect. Then again, he might just be doing just that. The thought of it cheered her immeasurably. It might be possible to finish her column a day early. She climbed the stairs to her office, listening to the creaking of the old wood beneath the Persian runners. She decided to step back down one step and replay the creaking. Then up one she went, listening. Then back down, comparing. She pivoted there for a while and realized she could reproduce the sound, but not always. This old house was mined with diversion. She put a hand on the wall. There was a herringbone pattern beneath the lacquered white, as if someone had painted over indented wallpaper. It was only here, on the stairs. The rest of the rooms were smooth. Her fingernail bumped down the angled grooves in a crazy-cat way. What a marquise of dawdle she was! She hurried now, down the hall to her second-floor office, lined with books.

At the keyboard, lassitude arrived. She was injected with it; her bloodstream had slowed to algae in jelly. It was the column. There on her laptop it was—the dreaded, half-written, beseechingly awfully conceived latest proof of her fraudulence, of her incapacity to craft anything more than a few hundred words, to reach any farther than a cocktail napkin, to focus any longer than the time it took to shower and shampoo. The column was about the peregrination of grown children to college campuses in the fall, the complexity of expectations and the inevitability of loss, the affirmations retrievable despite the complexities, and the ways in which these personal reflections were actually political reflections, parables about the way we live now.