The room was too hot. She felt in the short sleeve of her dress for her lace handkerchief, so that she could pat her forehead with it, but the handkerchief was not there. She remembered taking it out of her raincoat pocket out there in the hall and fitting it carefully, all folded into a triangle as it was, into the sleeve, but now it was gone. But it couldn’t be gone. It was real Irish linen, edged with real lace, and it had been a present from her mother four Christmases ago, and from the day she received it until tonight it had lain in its tissue paper in its original complicated pointed folds. She had never so much as shaken it out. She had barely touched it. It had stayed in its box, lying like a treasure at the bottom of the drawer where she kept her clothes, until tonight. It couldn’t be gone, but it was gone. It must have slipped from her sleeve when she was dancing around so gaily, making a show of herself. If she hadn’t been so taken with herself she might have felt it go. Now it was down there on the floor under someone’s feet. It would be a rag by this time. Even if it was a rag, she would be glad to have it back. Her mother had hesitated a long time before buying it, and then she had asked that it be wrapped in white paper, because it was a present, and she had carried it home and walked in smiling and saying to Rose, “I have something lovely for you.” It was the best handkerchief money could buy. Her mother had gone out to buy a woolen vest for herself, and she had seen the handkerchief, and instead of buying the vest for herself she had bought the handkerchief for Rose. The lace on it was real and there was a great deal of lace on it. When Rose first opened the box and lifted up the handkerchief, she and her mother looked at it very carefully, tracing the shells and roses and daisies and shamrocks and ivy leaves that covered it like the ornamentation on a wedding cake; and not funereal anyway, because they were so small and so white — not a cold or an icy white but a radiant white, like rose petals.